Perennial Promises Kept

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high school girls seem to acquire in the fall: "As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things."

This is probably too much of a good thing. And Updike, while disagreeing with former critics of his methods, has noticeably reined in his writing in the past few years. His style has become tougher and more concrete. Says Author Roger Angell, who edits the Updike stories that appear in The New Yorker: "It seems to me that he's freed his writing from brilliance. He is a brilliant writer. But his prose has the brilliance of crystal; you can see through it. In reading the early Updike, you were aware of the writer. But now you find that all his perception and intelligence are being brought to bear on doing what the writing should do. You're no longer distracted by his writing."

Updike's past excesses stemmed from enthusiasm, an ardency toward the world that his major characters share as well. In the famous conclusion of Rabbit Run (1960), the hero races toward life as if it promised victory: "Out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." Updike's men are lovers of the here and now and not afraid to look foolish while saying so. Piet Hanema in Couples, Harry Angstrom in the three Rabbit novels, Bech, assorted adolescents and husbands in the short stories: all act in childlike confidence, as if their surroundings have been put there specifically for them to enjoy. In a typical Updike domestic scene, the young people are more cynical than their parents. Rabbit's disagreeable son Nelson sees and awkwardly ridicules his father's satisfaction with self: "Such a fool he really believes that there is a God he is the apple of the eye of."

Updike's fiction consistently repays such faith. His people lead charmed, if sometimes guilty lives, and so in most ways has he. An only child, encouraged by doting parents, he became what he had hoped to be. Fate has sometimes kissed him. Once, on a fall day in 1960, he was "falling in love and away from marriage." He went down to Boston to visit a woman friend on Beacon Hill. She was not home. Disappointed, Updike wandered off and remembered that the Red Sox had a game scheduled at Fenway Park that afternoon. He went and saw Ted Williams hit a home run in his final at-bat, during what turned out to be the last game of his splendid career. Inspired, Updike wrote an instantly recognized classic of sports reporting: "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."

Updike's furtive presence in Boston that day was indeed lucky, but the strains in his marriage, then seven years old, were to grow increasingly severe over the next decade. He began writing stories about a couple named Joan and Richard Maple and their four children (pieces later adapted for TV and collected in a book called Too Far to