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Mr. Nice Guy
| Article
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20395 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
3,480 Words |
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
ODD JOBS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
John Updike
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991
919 pp., $35.00
If John Updike were Jewish he would rank among the top contenders for the Alan Dershowitz Chutzpath Award, for it takes a special nerviness to believe that people will buy and then read this fat, ugly monstrosity of a book that cost more than the annual per capita income of any number of impoverished nations. With droll understatement Updike labels Odd Jobs a "high heap of work," and admits that "it is hard to believe that even the chairbound agoraphobe will read this collection straight through". Edmund Wilson, subject of an admiring portrait in Odd Jobs, insisted that a book be wieldy enough to be read in bed. He would have groused about this one.
Updike suffers from an especially nasty disease. This malady signals its onset by seizing the victim with an irresistible urge to snatch up a pencil and scribble words upon paper. Exhibiting classic symptoms, Updike pleads: "After all, what is a writer for but to write?" Passing into its next phase the illness subjects the sufferer to a frenzy of magazine publication. Which periodical doesn't matter: Updike favors the New Yorker, in a pinch anything will do; Cosmopolitan, Sport, Vogue, the Boston Globe, TV Guide, Popular Mechanics, Michigan Quarterly Review, "W", Poets and Writers Magazine, Bookends. The disease runs its course within eight to ten years, at which time the patient gathers his fugitive pieces into a book. But it doesn't end there, even before the book rolls from the presses the affection resumes its ravaging cycle, plunging the helpless individual a new into the throes of writing and publishing. Like an alcoholic, the victim of Updike's Syndrome refuses to acknowledge his sickness, engaging instead in prattling rationalizations. Updike reveals the severity of his own case in the preface to Odd Jobs.
Some novelists--Bellow, Styron, Pynchon--seem able to confine themselves to well-spaced presentations of book-length works to a grateful public; I, even though (or perhaps because) I have lived most of my life in small towns, need a certain reassurance of proofs coming and going, of postage and phoning, of input and output. The discreet fuss of periodical publication gives me citizenship in the corporate world and connects me, not too bindingly, with a network of literary colleges. I cannot live within the anchorite's cell of a novel all the time. And, raised in a Depression atmosphere of financial anxiety. I have trouble turning money
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