Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

...The wealth of reviews, and the virtual education in the state of recent fiction they offer, are the heart of the book...

...besides their expected display of wit and metaphoric brightness, his reviews show pleasantly what he knows and what he has learned in order to do his job well...

...He pops the balloons of Carl Sagan's cosmology, of Roland Barthes's several "unreadable" books on reading, of Pinter's unfilmed Proust screenplay (Marcel has become a "standard cinema stud...

...This question must be raised for several reasons...

...Few of them fail in the task, fewer still appear tossed off or simply misguided...

...On the other hand, in Levi-Strauss's The Origin of Table Manners imagination has failed...

...Still, the volume and diversity of the reviews when taken up all at once produce a sense of alarming efficiency, as though Updike's compulsions to read widely and write cloak rather than sustain each other...

...That spirit of solving each work's mystery, or surmounting its barriers, permeates these reviews (by far the bulk of the collection, most from the New Yorker...

...Yet the more Updike approaches the essay proper, curiously, the more his writing hesitates to vault beyond the eloquence of appreciation to the large definitive wisdom one seeks in the best critical thought...

...Updike's neglect of the social and political forces which Melville felt and wrote of so deeply leaves the impression that his vicissitudes were purely internal, his enigmatic works and authorial life in no particular way tied to the national crises of the 1850s and 60s...

...Updike lives up to this ideal more often than most reviewers...

...HUGGING THE SHORE: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM John Updike/Alfred A. Knopf/$19.95 Eric J. Sundquist Defending the length of his new collection, some 900 pages of reviews, occasional essays, vignettes, and varied ephemera from the past eight years, John Updike notes that a quarter of the words belong to other people: "A good review is, among other things, a little anthology...

...Nevertheless, he maintains rather conservative formal and thematic standards, and regrets that much contemporary "artistic exploration has taken place along a frontier lined with other books instead of exerting any very hungry pressure, in the manner of the prewar giants, against the world itself...

...Some assessments are idiosyncratic...

...Summoning the "urban" tradition of Augustine, Dante, Piranesi, and Giacometti to elucidate Italo Calvino's enchanting travel fantasy, Invisible Cities, Updike writes: "The gift of space that this book ends by calling for, then, is just what the book itself bestows...

...Certainly, few American novelists or critics share his wide command of the world of letters...

...A handful of fictional vignettes...

...Updike is at ease anywhere acts of imagination have been transfigured into words, most of all when his own verbal powers can detect the energy behind the act...

...The praise of Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County ("the most intelligent attempt by an American male to dramatize sexual behavior as a function of, rather than a suspension of, personality") reflects Updike's similar fascination with genital love...

...He appears at his best in reviews of works by the same author now set in sequence so as to form a serial essay (for instance, those of Nabokov, Calvino, Anne Tyler, or Raymond Queneau) or in longer single pieces (Edmund Wilson's fiction, the Levi-Strauss review...

...Updike's preface tells us that a special pleasure arose in the Levi-Strauss review from "having seen a knotty thing through and phrased a clear conclusion...

...Leaving aside Updike's sly confession that his reviewer's fee and his monthly alimony payment were roughly the same, one feels that only a sheer love of writing could drive a man busy bringing forth abundant fiction of his own to such devoted attention to the work of others...

...Updike's encounters with other novelists are a combination of delight and industri-ousness, every sentence a careful thought carved into words worthy Eric J. Sundquist is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author most recently of Faulkner: The House Divided (Johns Hopkins...

...In an otherwise surprisingly persuasive consideration of Vonnegut's best fiction ("Who of his writing contemporaries strikes us as an imag-iner, as distinguished from a reporter or a self-dramatizer...

...Updike questionably asserts, apropos of Vonnegut's own ambiguous statements, that the fiction writer need not decide whether the "United States was evil, foolish, or right in waging war against Nazi Germany...

...The letters, fiction, and biographies of dozens of authors, dead and living, are generously weighed and elegantly described in Hugging the Shore...

...his criticism here reminds us how volatile and diverse are the ways of rendering that world in words...

...A third, on Melville's late career, recapitulates with clarity and feeling his public failure but adds little to views current since Melville was revived sixty years ago...

...Of course Updike is hardly alone among critics in preferring and promoting the aesthetic aspects of literature...

...While this preference is one source of his elegance and sympathetic generosity as a reviewer, it often circumscribes the value and reach of his thought...

...Marshaled by a Marxist theory that "locates its Utopia not in the future but in the past," the once vibrant stories of early American myth float in the anthropologist's sky "like angels doing military drills," their "orderly revolutions and transpositions . . . making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age...

...Two pieces on Hawthorne and Whitman (devised first as talks) are thus finely crafted deliveries of pedestrian ideas...

...and he refuses to slaver, as reviewers predictably did, over the embarrassing boasts and insults revealed in Hemingway's letters (published against his wishes), directing us instead to "the valuable-the fine and good and true and lovely- Hemingway [that] is to be found in the writing he published in books, just where he said it would be...

...essays on golf, New England, and Venezuela...

...Likewise, in his introduction to Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass Updike reads the nightmare world of the protagonist and his grotesquely figured dying "Father" in purely autobiographical and creative terms, with no reference to the political nightmare encroaching upon Poland and Polish Jews by 1937, when the book first appeared...

...of-sometimes surpassing-those of his subject...

...Updike's novels at their best remind us of the rich, moving everyday world that is our own...

...He stargazes at Doris Day and Louise Brooks...

...Although these kinds of shortcomings are not exactly minor, they are hidden by Updike's always perceptive eye and his abiding belief in, and lavish presentation of, the art of fiction...

...several interview fragments and prize acceptance speeches-these fill out the book but neither increase nor diminish its worth...

...No American writer can be less successfully estimated outside his historical context than Melville...

...How often, faced with a little-known novel of exotic setting (Shusaka Endo's Silence), does a reviewer straightforwardly haul out his Encyclopedia Britannica to study the seventeenth-century persecution of Japanese Christians...

...amid the crowded, confused, consuming 'infernal city . . . where we live every day,' art and imagination, creating inner space, are offered as amelioration...

...He finds a book by William Burroughs concocted with "scissors and eggbeater" and likens the reader of Gunter Grass's recent political fictions to "a psychiatrist patiently auditing a stream of free association," waiting for a "clue to the monologist's real concerns...

...A cosmopolitan, Updike writes equally well of American, European, African, and Asian literature-and always with the appropriate tact or acid sharpness...