Sex has become routine in Updike's new book
By Carl Heintze
John Updike is one of America's most prolific authors. Over the past three decades he has churned out about a novel a year, plus dozens of short stories, essays, book reviews and other writings.
Most of the short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker Magazine. The novels have rolled out one after the other. At least four of them deal with Harry Angstrom, better known as Rabbit. A couple of others are a sort of biography of a famous Jewish novelist named Bech. Updike seems to like to write sequels.
His latest book is titled, perhaps provocatively Licks of Love, and it includes two more episodes of sequel. One is another chapter in Bech's life, (apparently the third), the second is yet another in the Harry Angstrom series.
Since Harry has passed, on this work, a novella, is titled Rabbit Remembered, a kind of postscript to Angstrom's life. In between these are short stories, most of them like much of Updike's work, targeted on the unhappy married life of the American middle class, white Protestant male. Or to put it another way, Updike spends a lot of time investigating the marital infidelities of American men of a certain class.
Perhaps this is a little unfair. Updike also investigates the marital infidelities of his Jewish novelist, too, but they don't seem much different than the rest of the men into whose life sexual adventures (and women) just seem to drop like overripe fruit.
And that's about it. Updike doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about social status, work, death, children or other aspects of middle class life. Instead, his males seem to worry more about their sex lives or lack thereof, or their betrayal of their wives, their attempts to find happiness with their new girlfriends, often the wives of neighbors, etc.
It's become a wearying thing.
It all got started in Couples, a novel about married couples in a small New England town (Updike's world is pretty much bounded by New
Jersey and Vermont, Pennsylvania and the Atlantic) and what one might crudely call wife swapping.
Oddly enough, although he often describes these sexual encounters in excruciating detail, the women the men meet in his books seem faceless. They come and they go, they carp and complaint, but one wonders why the males find them at all attractive.
Nor does adultery seem anything but a cheerless and mechanical round. It's really not even very pornographic, even though Updike sex is often detailed. Harry Angstrom, for instance, hankers after a neighbor for years, but she doesn't provide true happiness. Happiness is in short supply for Updike heroes.
What saves his novels (and essays and reviews) is the skill with which he handles the English language, or more properly, the American language, for Updike is writing for Americans. He's no Virginia Wolf. It's more evident in his essays and reviews than in his novels, but he can write well; there's no doubt about that.
It's possible , of course, that this might be reward enough for the reader, but after a while all the men seem to be as faceless, and as faithless, as the women and a kind of numb despair sets in. It's characterized best in a short story about a man who visits a prostitute.
The story is really a long and detailed physical description of their meeting and mating, a joyless, clinical discussion of sex. That's it. At first, it would seem there is some message in this encounter, but after a while purpose seems to fade, just as does the "hero" of the story who goes off into the night alone, depleted but unsatisfied.
And that's the feeling one gets after plowing through "Licks of Love." It's as if Updike himself is tired of it all, as if he has mastered the technique, the description without being able to add any inspiration, any reason why the reader should cherish Harry Angstrom, Herr Bech or any of the other rootless males of the Updike world.
One wonders if this is more than an observation on Updike's part. Is the middle-aged, middle-class American male all this unhappy with his marriage(s). Is adultery better or worse than fidelity? Isn't there something beyond this search for a Helen who lives somewhere between Burlington and New York City, and who seems incapable of being found? Or even recognized?
One would like to think so. But "Licks of Love" does not seem to bring her any closer. Instead she seems to be receding into the distance, even as Harry Angstrom struggled briefly with his fate and then died, unmourned by many.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
