Monthly Archives: March 2026

John Updike’s prose

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Some thoughts about John Updike’s style…

I recently posted on the first of American author John Updike (1932-2009)’s trilogy of novels about his fictitious, fractious Jewish author Henry Bech. I was uncertain whether to continue with the next one. Some aspects of the narrative jarred with me: Bech’s unreconstructed attitude towards women, his accompanying solipsism (often manifested in malicious sarcasm and spiky wordplay), and the mannered, verbose prose style with echoes of Nabokov and maybe Henry James. But there were also passages where the satire on the mid-20C American literary world, and the grumpy protagonist’s abrasive contacts with it and that of other countries, sparkled with brilliant wit and flair. An odd mix.

I decided to go on with book 2: Bech Is Back (1982). Once again it’s structured as a sequence of linked short stories, reflecting the publication of many of them originally as stand-alone pieces in The New Yorker. I haven’t finished it yet, and again I’m finding it frustratingly tacky in places, but there’s always something special about the novel that keeps me going on. Maybe I’m just not in tune with Updike’s tone and satiric purpose.

Before I post on the novel as a whole, I thought I’d discuss something about the prose style that I’ve brought up previously. The sentences are meticulously crafted; there’s often more going on beneath the level of the words that causes the reader to pause and reflect, ‘What else is going on here, apart from the surface meaning?’

Updike’s style is eclectic, featuring a heady range of registers, from patrician, poised and highbrow, with a dazzlingly broad vocabulary and syntactical virtuosity, to the harsh, direct and often vulgar language of the streets. I intend to illustrate this when I post on the novel as a whole.

It’s that vocabulary I wanted to highlight here. Updike keeps you on your linguistic toes (his stretching of language’s semantic limits is catching) much of the time, but here’s one word that I had to go and look up: ANFRACTUOUS. Here’s the passage it appears in; Bech is now married to his former mistress’s sister, Bea, both of whom we met in Bech: A Book, and living in the suburban town of Ossining in upstate New York, in the huge ‘mock-Tudor’ house where Bea lived with her first husband, describing his installation in this ‘mansion’ as being ‘like a hermit crab tossed into a birdhouse’. He feels uneasy immersed in this Wasp community with its complacent bourgeois domesticity (shades of Cheever here, too, perhaps – he lived there for the last two decades of his life) and whitewashed history (Ossining changed its earlier name of Sing Sing because of its associations with the infamous prison there). First a bit more context is needed, and an example of that supple, playful Updike style:

The folks downtown looked merry to Bech, and the whole burg like a play-set; he had the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. On that sloping stage between Peekskill and Tarrytown he enjoyed being enrolled in the minor-city minstrelsy; he often volunteered to run Bea’s errands for household oddments [ofen in the drugstore] and marveling at the copious cosmetic aids of vain, anxious America. His light-headedness on these away-from-home afternoons strengthened him to burrow on, through that ANFRACTUOUS [my capitals] fantasy he was tracing among the lost towers of New York.

See what I mean? This is very much Updike’s cunning way of showing Bech’s sardonic reactions to this environment with its ‘sunstruck somnolence’ – Washington Irving’s fairytale country, the antithesis of edgy NYC. If he felt like a hermit crab in Bea’s mansion, here in downtown he’s like a mole, grubbing its way through thick, unyielding earth. And maybe there’s an anticlimactic allusion there to Fitzgerald’s famous last lines in The Great Gatsby, ‘so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly to the past’.

Back to ‘anfractuous’. Here’s the OED definition:

having many twists and turns; winding or sinous (first recorded in 15C)

From the 1920s it started to be used more figuratively to denote ‘humorous and ironic. Unruly, peevish’ – all resonances Updike surely intended to be felt.

At the level of the sentence, then, Updike rewards attentive reading. That extended theatrical metaphor collides with then reinforces what follows about Bech’s ‘fantasy’. I need to overcome my aversion to what can be seen as Updike’s flashiness and enjoy his craftsmanship and sleight of hand.

Vigdis Hjorth, Will & Testament

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Vigdis Hjorth, Will & Testament. Verso pb, 2019, first published in Norwegian 2016, 330 pp. Translated by Charlotte Barslund. Library copy.

I’d never read a Norwegian-authored novel before, and so when I came across a reference to one of Hjorth’s more recent novels, I checked my local library catalogue: Will & Testament was the only title of hers in stock, so I borrowed and read it.

I’d like to say I enjoyed it, but I didn’t. I skipped quite a bit, which was quite easy, because it’s written in an annoyingly repetitive, reflexive style: sentences and clauses are repeated or rephrased over and over, holding up the flow of the narrative, and making the first-person narrator sound self-absorbed.

I acknowledge that this is a bit unfair, as she’s trying constantly to come to terms with a traumatic sequence of events in her early childhood, and the subsequent painful rifts caused in the family by her finally telling her parents and siblings about it. They refuse to believe her, causing the trauma to be redoubled: it kind of metastasises in her. She self-medicates with alcohol, and messes up several relationships with men.

There’s an awful lot, too, about the constant stream of emails and phone conversations that result from her ending the 23-year period of estrangement from the rest of the family. Now in her fifties and with children and grandchildren of her own, it seems some kind of resolution and repair might be about to happen.

This is scuppered by that most destructive of events in so many families: news of a ‘last will and testament’ (hence the title in English) and the ways in which the parents have announced the distribution of their assets is to be accomplished. In particular the two holiday cabins in which all of the family have enjoyed spending summers are to go to the two younger sisters, while the narrator and her elder brother are left feeling cast aside by a humiliatingly small bequest of cash.

I’m afraid I just couldn’t care too much about any of this. I’ve read a few reviews in the online media and by fellow bloggers, most of whom speak in glowing terms about this novel. Maybe it’s a deficiency in me; but I felt relief when I’d rushed through the final pages – in which nothing is really resolved, and it’s never entirely clear if the childhood trauma did actually take place. Her mother is no comfort: she’s a drama queen with several performative suicide attempts to her name, and a tendency towards hysteria and submissive acceptance of her husband’s (the narrator’s father’s) domineering ways.

Or maybe her father, portrayed as a cold-hearted tyrant, was right in telling her that she only needed to look in a mirror to see the face of a psychopath. I prefer to think he’s the dodgy one.

There’s some quite interesting stuff about philosophy and politics – Hjorth makes some valid comparisons with the futile efforts of this dysfunctional family to make up its differences and repair itself with the truth and reconciliation initiatives of countries like S. Africa after apartheid. There can be no forgiveness without an acknowledgement of the grievances that caused the fissures and conflict.

That repetitive, looping style and confessional tone made the novel seem cold and clinical – which is strange considering the powerful emotional nature of the content. There’s very little dialogue or scene-setting; most of the attention is on what’s going on in the narrator’s (often confused, denying, angry) head. I’ve nothing against this mannered kind of writing, but it just didn’t work for me.

John Updike, Bech: A Book

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John Updike, Bech: A Book. Pt 1 of The Complete Henry Bech: Twenty Stories. Everyman’s Library 264 hb, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; pp. 1-152 of 509.

This novel is very different in subject and style from Updike’s (1932-2009) four Rabbit novels, which I devoured some years ago. As with that tetralogy, he added a new Bech novel (three of them) at roughly ten-year intervals.

Unlike Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a WASP like Updike, a working-class everyman who would no doubt be a Trump/MAGA supporter today, Henry Bech is Jewish (but with anti-Semitic tendencies), cerebral and educated, and author of several novels that had been published to varying degrees of acclaim. He’s considered, in Bech: A Book, where he’s middle-aged, a celebrity.

But he’s blocked (though he jokes that he’s just a ‘slow typist’). He has ideas for a new novel, but can’t bring it to life. So he takes on various government-sponsored cultural/lecturing visits to Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and S. America. There he talks on highbrow topics to do with modern American literature (though his favourite authors include Melville and Hawthorne):

His reputation had grown while his powers declined.

Like Rabbit, he’s angst-ridden and lost, ‘displaced’. Here’s a revealing passage, quoted satirically by Updike from an article by a fictitious British journalist (who’d claimed to be an ardent fan), where the writer comments on Bech’s ‘oeuvre’:

…Queried concerning the flowery, not to say fruity, style of The Chosen [Bech’s third and most recent novel, published in 1963, seven years earlier].

With self-referential wit, Updike writes this novel in a similarly baroque, ‘fruity’ style, with arresting turns of phrase, puns and epigrams. Take this extract, where Bech is about to deliver one of his lectures to students at a girls’ school in ‘rural Virginia’. His habitual existential angst kicks in as he contemplates the expectant young audience:

…those seriously sparkling eyes, those earnestly flushed cheeks, those demurely displayed calves and knees – appalled him with the abyss of their innocence…The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hangs behind everything.

He goes on:

He saw himself, in this nest of delicate limbs, limbs still ripening toward the wicked seductiveness Nature intended, as a seed among too many eggs, a gross thrilling intruder, a genuine male intellectual Jew…[and so on for five more lines].

Women are often depicted in this novel, from Bech’s lubricious perspective, in this ‘male gaze’ kind of way: they tend to be seen in terms of how sexually attractive he finds them. If this is meant satirically, it still strikes an unsavoury note for me, and I struggled at times to carry on reading. Admittedly, Updike has chosen a flawed character whose attitudes and behaviour (especially towards women), like Rabbit’s, aren’t always admirable – but these factors, along with the tortuous, self-consciously literary style, make for a troubling, only intermittently satisfying read.

What kept me going was the appearance every now and then of an image, a sentence or passage of breathtaking elegance, wit and technical brilliance: these more than made up for the otherwise laboured Jamesian complexity and tone that came across to me as borderline smug. Here’s one passage I marked as pleasing – not his best, but fairly typical; Bech is an a lecturing trip to Bulgaria:

There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked – that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker.

Ten years ago I quoted from and analysed two passages from Rabbit Redux (1971) HERE and HERE.

International Women’s Day 2026

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International Women’s Day #IWD2026

This is from the header to the home page of the International Women’s Day homepage:

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge gender equality. Get ready for #IWD2026.

(Link to that website HERE. Lots of material, resources and suggestions on this site.)

Tomorrow is IWD, so I thought I’d post something relevant.

I was about to walk to the supermarket this morning and looked for something to listen to on the way that wasn’t about the war and mayhem in today’s world (thank you Nobel Peace Prize seeker DJT). I came across an episode of a podcast I subscribe to: Arts & Ideas (search for it on your usual podcast platform). It’s a spinoff of BBC Radio 4 material. In this episode the presenter Shahidha Bari looks at ‘how women express themselves in language, argument, poetry and art’ (from the episode descriptor).

Her guests are Sara Ahmed, an Australian writer and scholar (has interesting things to say about complaints and the language of complaining); Lauren Elkin, who needs no introduction – I’ve posted briefly HERE on her book Flâneuse; Karen McCarthy Woolf, whose latest poetry collection is called Unsafe; Mary Wellesley, a historian with a special interest in women in the medieval period; Ash Percival-Borley, a military historian and former soldier.

They all offer fascinating comments and insights in their discussion of women’s voices and language and how they resonate in a world that tends to dismiss, marginalise or trivialise them. I’d highly recommend a listen to this episode. I found it inspiring and informative. I must look out for an anthology of World War I poetry by women that was mentioned – I hadn’t realised that there was such a body of work (which kind of illustrates the ways in which women’s voices are often displaced by men’s in our culture.)

What else can I suggest from this blog that you might find of interest in connection with IWD? I’d begin with some of my most recent posts about a woman writer whose sequence of five linked novels is among the finest, most moving and engaging fiction I’ve read in a long time: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s the Cazalet Chronicles. She focuses on a group of women of varying degrees of independence and agency in the context of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family.

Some of my other favourite writers are women (just put their names in the search box to find my numerous posts about them):

Barbara Pym

Barbara Comyns

Elizabeth Taylor

Anita Brookner

Rose Tremain

Elizabeth Bowen

Virginia Woolf

Vita Sackville-West

There are many more I could have mentioned, but those are the ones who come to my mind most immediately.

This is my contribution to what the IWD website describes in one of its aims as setting out to elevate and celebrate women’s voices and achievements.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Getting It Right

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Elizabeth Jane Howard, Getting It Right. Picador pb 2015 (19821) 410 pp.

What a contrast to the Cazalet Chronicles (I posted on them here last month). Most of the characters in Getting It Right come from a much lower social stratum than the Cazalet family. Gavin is 31, a hairdresser in a West End salon, and still a reluctant virgin.

He’s too timid and diffident to make any important decisions – such as moving out of his stifling parents’ house, where he has no agency, privacy or independence. Whenever he encounters conflict or unpleasantness, he bottles up his feelings and adopts avoidance strategies. Inside his head, however, he indulges powerful unexpressed thoughts and reactions – like standing up to his boorish, lazy and demanding boss.

The same applies when it comes to sex (he’s fairly sure he’s not gay). He has erotic (but always unconsummated) fantasies, but shies away from any meaningful contact with women in real life – or any social contacts outside of his comfort zone. He’s far too self-judging/critical to believe that anyone could find him attractive, and languishes in the frustration and loneliness that are the natural consequence of these traits.

During the course of the novel this changes. He encounters several women who challenge his default aversion to relationships, and discovers that he does have the capacity to take emotional risks – to ‘get it right’ emotionally and romantically.

There’s some sharp observation, insight and humour in EJH’s depiction of these characters, but ultimately I found it a far less rewarding reading experience than the Cazalets, or even the other works of her fiction that I’ve read. Gavin is just too drippy and irritating in his Prufrockian timidity to find sufficiently sympathetic, and many of the secondary characters just don’t ring true.

There are several aspects to the novel that resonate interestingly now that I’ve read EJH’s memoir Slipstream (discussed in my previous post); much of Gavin’s lack of self-confidence, his sensitivity and diffidence look very like the author’s own, and like him she made some disastrous choices and decisions. His being exploited and patronised by other people resembles much of what she describes in Slipstream and in fictional form in the Cazalet sequence. It’s not enough, though, to make Getting It Right anything like as good as her superb late quintet of novels.