Perennial Promises Kept

COVER STORY

For John Updike at 50, Bech tops off a very good year

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your tour guide speaking, welcoming you once again to the New England literary express. We ve already visited the houses of Hawthorne, Melville and Robert Frost. Next, a live one. Our bus is 25 miles north of Boston and nearing the seaside home of John Updike. Get your cameras ready. You will find the author's barony photogenic, and the author, if we should spot him, has weathered well himself. It might interest you to know that our subject and his second wife Martha moved here in the spring of 1982, a particularly productive time in the life of...

Rabbit is rich. Bech is back. Updike is ubiquitous.

The perennially promising young man of American letters is 50 and enjoying a very good year indeed. Spring kept him busy accepting awards. Rabbit Is Rich, his third look at an aging ex-jock in southeastern Pennsylvania, is now being issued in paperback after winning the literary Triple Crown: the Pulitzer Prize ("Critics have called the book a fulfillment of Updike's fabulous promise"), an American Book Award ("Let us celebrate the prestidigitator who tells today with passion and warning, and tricks it into language's jubilee") and a commendatory scroll from the National Book Critics Circle ("The novel vibrates with success"). To commemorate Updike's first half-century, his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., has released a handsome new edition of the author's first book, a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen (1958). Many writers would be content to rest, at least for a beat, on such laurels. Not Updike. This month will witness the publication of Bech Is Back (Knopf; $13.95), a series of seven related stories that amount to his 26th volume. This figure does not include Updike's four books for children, which sometimes tug at the dust jackets of their elders and ask to be let into the canon. And No. 27, a thick manuscript of essays, literary criticism, reviews and serendipitous miscellanea, currently sits on a groaning desk in his editor's office in midtown Manhattan, awaiting its turn to augment the author's reputation.

For Updike is now indisputably at the top of his craft. No one else using the English language over the past 2½ decades has written so well in so many ways as he.

Light verse? A younger Updike retired with the title some years ago:

The cars in Caracas

create a ruckukus,

a four-wheeled fracacas,

taxaxis and truckes.

Neither the author's older self nor anyone else has mounted a convincing challenge. Updike belongs to the minority that takes his serious poetry seriously. As for the rest, he has his peers, perhaps betters, as a novelist, belletrist, essayist and short-story writer, but they are different people in each case. Updike's versatility has been achieved at some cost. The rules governing his work have remained consistent and deliberately circumscribed. Wit dominates passion; irony mocks the possibility of tragic grandeur. The feelings most likely to seize Updike's comfortably situated people are nostalgia and lust.

Yet this world, for all its limitations, remains a living, growing entity. In so faithfully maintaining and adding to it, he has earned a place apart as a