Books
lisher" with a confused but indignant protest about the sexist use of the pronoun, "and at a language association meeting," she shouted. The speaker was unperturbed, went on with his...
...In A Month o/ Sundays he made his adulterer a minister so readers presumably liberated by books like Couples could accept that there might he someone left w~ could slip on religious scruples in his dash to sexual freedom...
...Even if this is true, the novel within October Light is a ham-handed way of demonstrating it...
...It is easy to ,reduce Mary Me to silliness in this Soap Opera Digest fashion because Updike's sensibility here is sentimental and self-indulgent...
...For all of us they have been profoundly important, and now that more than a decade has passed since the end of the Council we can begin to interpret their meaning...
...What does all the commotion, the cocktail parties by publishers and periodicals, the hundred or so booths in the book exhibit, the confabs in the hallways of the Sheraton and the Americana come to...
...But with the Council the center of authority is no longer simply the Vatican...
...There is very little mobility in the profession, professors at the top ranks are blessed with longevity and a stubborn hold on their places, and a whole generation of young scholars, because of budget cuts, falling registrations and severe shortages of everything, is suffering, with the real possibility of being lost...
...One of them, at least, is true of Marry Me: "any romance that does not end in marriage fails...
...Yes, Louis Kamp had a good slogan there...
...Updike takes his oharacters much more seriously than he makes them...
...The Second Vahcan Council was thus without a doubt one of the most significant events in Christian history...
...There's a mixed image, fit subject...
...Neither anaohronism nor romance, though, is an excuse for the triviality of character and the slackness of language that make Marry Me an embarrassing twitch of a major talent...
...But to write about them in those same commonplaces and to adopt their sentimentality (easy love, easy despair) are lamentable mistakes...
...As for the rest, the same amount of solid, substantial scholarship seems to be going on, with perhaps a more than usual of often ephemeral stuff being loosed upon the air in "special sessions...
...The employment situation in higher education is still bad...
...However only in eight years, the terms of it have changed, the tigers of wrath have gone away, and the horses of instruction are now in the saddle...
...One of the oddest side effects is the disturbance of non-Catholics, some of whom felt the earth tremble with the shift from Latin to the vernacular...
...This perspective and ks attendant language, the not quite Rockwellian minor characters, and the unlocking of James Page's armored self in his late October would have sufficed very nicely...
...There are a few jobs here and there, almost all of them one-year appointments teaching Freshman composition in junior colleges, or at night, in East Lansing and Orono and Nigeria and Walla Walla...
...Very little, for the hundreds of graduate students, recent Ph.Ds and Pb.Ds from last year and the year before who have not been able to find teaching jobs, and who swarmed daily into the rooms set apart for interviews...
...But up close the book is long stretohes of banal conversation, art school metaphors, gauzy tx>eticisms ("ferny fragrance," "loamy farms," "skyey loops"), and big statements...
...A Pynchonized Dog Soldiers with a sci-fi ending, it kills much of her time and about a third of Gardner's novel...
...They all are about thirty, live in "Greenwood," and enjoy the beach...
...I'm not sure I believe him...
...This is what Peter Hebblethwaite does in The Runaway Church...
...Seeming to assume that adultery and sin axe an outmoded or unfashionable combination for a contemporary setting, Updike pretends to create an anachronism though the novel is about the present...
...That center is still in the process of defining itself, and the resultant ferment is more like preNicene times than it is like the Reformation, to which it is more frequently compared...
...I wish they had written better books...
...An agnostic I know even claims to be upset by th,~ new form for the rite of penance...
...You can deplore or ignore this ferment-Rome tries to do both at once ----or you can regard it with hope, as Hebblethwaite does...
...Many Catholics lived as if the Vatican had been lowered from heaven on a blanket, and if a lot of Protestants believed that it had ascended from another direction they were at least reassured that Catholicism was a constant...
...The front re4 February ]977- 90...
...Many of those who did sense the difference left the Church or, like Lord Acton, suffered a lonely existence within it...
...Sammler's Planet, Octboer Light is about the "unlocking" of an old man with hard opinions and little charity...
...The changes it introduced into the lives of Catholics have had effects so profound that no one really knows what will come of them...
...In Updike's romance, the words "marry me" are in the end only a fantasy...
...It contains portions of his dissertation...
...Sherry...
...The speaker was unperturbed, went on with his remarks, the protester left . . . . Most poignant note: a black vinyl briefcase with chrome trim marked "Richard Sherry" was lost...
...Like Bellow's Mr...
...Updike does make Ruth Conant more than the wronged woman, but the Mathiases remain 1961 exotica, the kind of people (self-confessed) who have children because their analysts think it would be healthy...
...James Page, a 72-year-old Vermont farmer, has an unchurched belief in "the battle of spirit up through matter," rigid Yankee principles, and contempt for the present...
...In his introduction he says that the Council "set in motion a process which, once started, the official Church was powerless to halt...
...Too long to work as parody and too meager to be taken seriously, Sally's book is reading only for a shutin with a shotgunned TV...
...Sally believes Smugglers is "trash," yet it begins to influence the vcay she thinks about her brother and the past...
...They'd like to get married, but Jerry has these terrible pangs of conscience...
...The finder was asked urgently to call Mr...
...Gardner's materials are the familiar ones of family chronicles--marital problems, parental failures, the twining of guilt and love---but with an interesting perspective of place, a Vermont small town where memory is long but the growing season is short...
...Gardner and Updike are skillful and necessary resisters...
...Jerry and Sally have an affair...
...Updike is also nervous about his materialsmmarriage, morality, and religious fairly--in Marry Me...
...it was something for all those others...
...His Vermonters sometimes sound like impressions done by a "flatland furiner" to this native, but they remain superior to the literary voices that "furiner" brought to Vermont with him...
...Even the most orthodox Catholic will admit, maybe after a couple of drinks, that his belief has undergone some major change as a result of the Council, or at least as a result of the times the Council was catching up with...
...The official papal llne is now generally seen as one of the extremes (this is especially true since Humanae Vitae) and not the center...
...Sickened by his older sister SaUy's TV, he shoots it and chases her into her bedroom, where she stays to set up a mighty conflict of wills that Gardner uses to examine the principles that lock James and "modernist" Sally into their comic but nearly destruotive combat...
...While they contest each other's righteousness, they consider how their experiences have brought them to their impasse and how it affects their family and friends...
...Gardner's point here and elsewhere in the novel is that literature (along with other media) does affect behavior and, implicitly, that the novelist has a responsibilty to tell an ennobling truth...
...And perhaps inconsistent too, since Smugglers is hardly affirmative...
...Before the Council most Catholics made no real distinction between "the official Church" and the mystical body of Christ...
...Jerry Conant is the throwback, a death-fearing, Baxth-reading Lutheran who loves his wife Ruth, his children, and Sally Mat hals, who is married to Richard...
...He flourishes his now familiar theology in extremis as though R could not fail to enlist our sympathy for Jerry Conant in his struggles against an atheist, Unitarian, and falien-away Catholic...
...others deplore them...
...There is an admirable doggedness to Marry Me...
...When forced into her bedroom retreat, Sally finds a beat-up paperback entitled The Smugglers o/ Lost Souls' Rock...
...Jerry, Ruth, Sally, and Richard are strung in their marital frames, punishing themselves and each other until they wear down ~o inaction...
...Fine to create people who have little to think or say beyond predictable commonplaces, ordinary people in all too common circumstances...
...In Marry Me Updike puts his agonized Christian back into 1961, "the twilight of the old morality" when a few suburbanites were still Christians, and calls the book a romance...
...Most Catholics welcome the changes...
...In October Light and Marry Me, they write of men "born in an age of spirits" (Gardner's phrase) but living with few visible reminders of this past, anachronistic men in consciously anachronistic novels...
...As it happens, Jerry really loves Sally, who makes him feel alive, and Sally xeally loves Jerry because he fills her up...
...Of course, Ruth and Richard find out and complications heretofore unimagined by Jerry and Sally ensue...
...Marry Me has four characters and six or so children...
...In the past," he writes towards the end of his book, "every hint and rumor of conflict tended to be suppressed...
...With Bellow, Gardner and Updike have resisted both language games and the apocalypse of fact by continuing with narrative leavened by the possibility, at least, of transcendence...
...He's afraid he'14 lose his immortal soul if he marries Sally, and besides be doesn't want .her to be the one to comfort him on his deathbed...
...It resembles one of those specialty gifts made of string-suspended ball bearings that knock into each other for what seems to he perpetual motion...
...The Runaway Church PETER HEBBLETHWAITE Seabury, $8.95 JOHN GARVEY For a long time Catholics equated religious change with frivolity, even with heresy...
...Little do they know that Riohard and Ruth have had an affair...
...In his attempt to defend the out-of-fashion fiction that is the strength of October Light, Commonweal: 89 Gardner ends up writing a contemporary clich6...
...But Gardner is defensive about this kind of fiction, and it is this defensiveness that spoils the book...
...for semiotic analysis, on a human BOOKS I I ,,,I UPDIKE & GARDNER: DOWN FROM THE HEIGHTS THOMAS LeCLAIR October I A g h t JOHN GARDNER Knopf, $10.00 Marsh Me: A Romance JOHN UPDIKE Knop/, $7.95 In October Light a Bennington coed asks her dance partner if he has read anything by John Updike, Gardner's nod of recognition to a fellow practitioner of spirit-flecked realism...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 3
