Older Writers Revisiting Their Younger Selves

They don't have much else in common, but Philip Roth, John Updike and Toni Morrison do resemble one another in at least one respect: their ages. Roth is 75 this year, Updike is 76, and Morrison is 77. (Roth and Updike are separated by exactly a year and a day.) Together these three are the ranking triumvirate of a literary generation that is way too all over the place to have a collective name--they ain't modernists, they ain't postmodernists--but that dominated American fiction for the second half of the 20th century. This year all three have arrived at an extraordinary moment of reflection.

Roth, Updike and Morrison have new novels out this fall, and in each of them they return to a story they first told much earlier in their careers. In The Widows of Eastwick, out Oct. 21, Updike has dreamed up a sequel to his novel of suburban sorcery, The Witches of Eastwick. In Indignation, published in September, Roth retells the story of Portnoy's Complaint, the brilliant, pneumatically obscene book that made him famous. And in A Mercy, due out in November, Morrison--the last American writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature--tells the story of a mother who loses her daughter to slavery, just as she did in Beloved.

There's nothing unusual about writers recycling material. They're a larcenous bunch; literature is an economy based almost entirely on theft. But when a writer steals from him- or herself, something quite different is going on. This kind of revisiting is a way for older writers to make contact with their younger selves across the abyss of time--to engage themselves in conversation, to argue over what they missed and what they got wrong and, above all, to register the ways that time has altered their understanding of the world--to get, by means of triangulation, some perspective on the years that separate them. By going over old ground, these old masters aren't just looking back. They are annexing new territory.

Life After Sex

It's a cruel irony: in an age when straight talk and authenticity are all anybody wants from writers, Updike is cursed with the unfashionable gift of eloquence. His prose is so effortlessly fluid, it gets him tagged as a lightweight, a silver-tongued devil: all art, no matter. But who has written more intelligently or more ruthlessly about sex and the suburbs than Updike? At least from the admittedly oversubscribed male point of view? Reread Couples--I dare you. Forty years on, it'll still rock you back on your heels. How did people know about that stuff in 1963? They didn't even have the Internet!

In The Widows of Eastwick, Updike revisits the three suburban housewives from Witches: Jane, Sukie and Alexandra. Old now and alone--their husbands have died of natural causes--they reunite and return to Eastwick to make peace with the many ghosts they left behind there: the rival they killed, the children they neglected, the lovers they dumped, their all-but-vanished sexuality and, not the least gruesome specter of the lot, the 1970s.