A lord of thin air

It is easy, especially if one is not American, to feel ambivalent about the fictions of John Updike. The immaculate clarity of his prose style, the precision of his vocabulary, the tenderness underlying his Wasp comedies of manners, the puckish wit rising above a sorrowful temperament — none of these can be gainsaid. But the ways in which his novels seemed to raise the banality of fornication to some remote altitude of meaning, his efforts to imbue the quandaries of adultery and cuckoldry with transcendent significance, can seem relentless and overdone. Updike at times resembles those fanatical sexologists who gathered around Alfred Kinsey interrogating Americans about the minutiae of their sexual preferences and acts, as if by dour, gritted study of silly squelching they could anticipate (to quote the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer) ‘the dreadful Day of Judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed’.  

Updike was a prolific reviewer and writer of occasional pieces. The range of his curiosity, the closeness of his attention and the depth of his perceptions are triumphantly displayed in the essays and criticism collected in Higher Gossip. The book, which is a joy to read for anyone who cherishes literary intelligence, dispels misgivings about him as a novelist, and indeed is an incitement to re-read the fiction with a less impatient spirit.

Updike is perhaps best of all — temperate, canny and revealing — when he writes about fellow novelists, and celebrates in them some of his own traits and tricks. The word-perfect control of his writings vies with those of two near-contemporaries, the novelists William Maxwell and John Cheever. In a shining essay, he describes Maxwell in his youth learning to find ‘excitement in the presence of life’, and savouring ‘the mysterious beauty of the commonplace’.