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.