Perennial Promises Kept

(6 of 10)
"The funny thing is that I really haven't missed them." But Updike sees rivalry as a fact of an author's life: "There's a lot of competition for rather few spaces. Or, to put it another way, the major leagues of writing are not very big."

He has never lacked for critics eager to consign him to the minors. His career began during the heyday of brilliant U.S. Jewish writing. Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, among others, were the critics' darlings. A sensitive outsider from the sticks did not measure up to prevailing standards. In Commentary, Norman Podhoretz complained, "His short stories ... strike me as all windup and no delivery." Bruised by appraisals like this, Updike eventually turned his hurt feelings to good use: "Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also."

Other early complaints centered on Updike's refusal to tinker with fiction in the approved post-modernist fashion. He recalls, "I certainly did feel left out of the black-humor thing when it was heavily publicized, because it did sound like an awful lot of fun, and they were getting all this serious attention.

People like Leslie Fiedler were smiling upon them, and one will do almost anything to get Leslie Fiedler to smile upon him. He never smiled on me." Indeed he did not. The champion of Norman Mailer and John Earth once called Updike "a strangely irrelevant writer." Updike later took gentle but effective revenge. At the end of Bech: A Book, a mock bibliography lists critical works on the imaginary author, including "Fiedler, Leslie, 'Travel Light: Synopsis and Analysis,' E-Z Outlines, No. 403 (Akron, O.: Hand-E Student Aids, 1966)."

With hindsight, Updike's unswerving dedication to realistic fiction looks both daring and inspired. At the beginning of his career, the prevailing wisdom held that Joyce, Proust and Kafka had made the old-fashioned novel redundant, a tired illusion that had been exposed once and for all as a sham. Literature should no longer pretend to portray people doing things: it ought to be an artful arrangement of words on a page. Critic Richard Oilman, typically, called narrative "that element of fiction which coerces and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life." Updike's novels and stories went right on, stubbornly offering swatches of alternative lives. Their author proved over the years that the ramshackle, theoretically condemned house of story telling still has some unexplored chambers and fresh air. "Fiction," he once said, "is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality. Reality is—chemically, atomically, biologically—a fabric of microscopic accuracies."

From this belief stemmed the famous, or infamous, Updike style: tiny things described at great length. Rare is the reviewer over 30 who has not at least once twitted Updike for preciosity and overwriting. Yet he is not a showoff, as critics like Alfred Kazin have sometimes claimed ("a brilliant actionlessness ... the world is all metaphor"). In the service of his intense, precise idea of truth, Updike simply loads some moments in his fiction with more words and significance than they can bear. From a story in the 1960s, describing the fragrance that