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Updike's Sheltered Self
| Article
# : |
20074 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
9,807 Words |
| Author
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Larry Woiwode
Larry Woiwode is the author of several novels, including the
recent Indian Affairs, and has a collection of essays The
Wheel at the Cistern, forthcoming. He lives in North Dakota. |
In 1964, when I was living in a rented room in New York City, I read my first Updike novel, The Centaur. I can still recall the dimensional sparkle that rose from the objects of that dingy room as I descended into Updike's prose. I went back to his earlier books and caught up, not such a difficult task at the time, just as The Olinger Stories came out. The year I was married, Assorted Prose and Of the Farm appeared, and in 1968, when my first daughter was born, Couples began climbing the best-seller list. I could date the appearance of each Updike book in relationship to my life, but rather than seem a candidate for another exiguous and uxorious (two Updike words), parasitically symbiotic U and I, I'll pause at these last novels, Of the Farm and Couples, because they represent the watershed in Updike's career.
I felt Of the Farm was, as the critic Peter Buitenhuis wrote in The New York Times Book Review of the day, "very clearly and very completely, a small masterpiece." But I also found it depressing. This was a new response for me to Updike. That exhilarating sparkle he could send through the mundane seemed to withdraw whenever I looked up from Of the Farm, and I sensed instead a troubling darkness.
Perhaps it was the subject matter, I thought; I was recently married and didn't have the heart to follow three generations of a family (represented by a "quartet of voices," as Updike's self-written flap copy reads) try to resettle itself in emotionally convoluted ways around a divorce. The seriocomic edge provided by Updike's most spacious character, George Caldwell, was absent--he had died offstage--and as Of the Farm circled the several sorts of betrayal at its center (mother of father, Joey of first wife, mother of all wives), I too felt betrayed. The emotional omnivorousness of Joey's mother, Mrs. Robinson, did not seem the excuse for a divorce but the excuse Joey had used because he wanted one: pragmatism.
In retrospect, I find Of the Farm one Updike's most artful novels, its compression remarkable, a poetic feat--scarcely a wasted action in 150 pages. The original cloth edition runs to 173, but each page won't fill one regular, double spaced manuscript page--a book designer's and compositor's minor feat: making a novella seem more a novel. Her and there in Of the Farm, you will encounter patches of highly stylized prose, as some critics of the day noted, when Updike's accent becomes too canted toward the "literary." In the following excerpt, the protagonist Joey is mowing his mother's rural meadow with a small, Fordson-style tractor:
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