I've shamefully neglected the writings of John Updike. I read the first Rabbit novel when it appeared in 1960 and was struck by its vigor and authenticity. A talent to watch, I said to myself -- but then I lost track. I loved one of the Bech books, devoured on an airline ride from somewhere to somewhere else twenty years ago. I've been dazzled by short stories in various anthologies and by art criticism in the NYRB. But for a writer considered an American master, nominated for a Nobel -- well, I've been inattentive. And now Updike is gone. I'm late (as usual). To remedy the personal deficiency, I hastened to the Bradford Public Library, where, sad to say, the only Updike on the shelf was one I'd never heard of,Villages, published in 2004.
Villages is billed as an autobiographical novel and appears to be so. It's eminently readable, slickly written (sometimes so facilely that it crosses into self-parody). But, my-oh-my, what an embarrassingly bad performance. It's no more than a sexual history of "Owen Mackenzie" in which the succession of women Owen encounters are diffentiated only by the size and shapes and degrees of mucosity and erectility of their reproductive organs. It's an adolescent novel written by a seventy-year-old eminence. What the heck was Updike thinking?. Why would he waste precious time on such unambitious, indulgent stuff -- unless he took a long-ago manuscript out of a drawer and fooled around with it a bit?
Disappointing indeed. A few years ago, I read through the novels of Philip Roth, who is an exact contemporary of Updike. My conclusion: that Roth (see Books over there on the side of the page) was a writer of arrested development. Oh no, not again!
Let's see if the BPL has anything else by Updike today. Let's hope for the best. Villages has got to be an aberration.
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