Problems, and Other Stories
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
Guilt is the mother of beauty PROBLEMS, AND OTHER STORIES John Updike Knopf, $10.00, 260 pp. Daniel M. Murtaugh JOHN updike has a well-earned reputation as a writer whose sentences...
...It is a source of revelation...
...Or who could improve on this flamboyant metaphor for what a divorced father hears in his daughter's voice on the phone as she contemplates the imminent 28 March 1980: 189 death of the family dog: "And the child's voice, so sensible and simple up to this point, generated a catch, tears, premonitions of eternal loss...
...The stories tend to move toward the fixing of a single mood or insight, and so the conflict of brilliant detail and larger design is less disturbing: the larger design is never that large...
...in the blue ground of his midnight brain certain bright moments that never failed to make him feel terrible...
...It is something to hold, to test the weight and texture of...
...The acuteness of his vision can be a distraction, a disembodied presence shouldering aside characters who are meant to interest us because of the limitations of their vision...
...The bafflement and guilty embarrassment that attends sex in this story recurs in several others, and a couple of times harks back to Augustine's Confessions, as a supporting text...
...This has always bothered me, for example, in the two "Rabbit" novels, despite my admiration for both of them...
...We review with the hero, "Ferris, a divorced, middle-aged man...
...Commonweal: 190...
...The best stories, I think, are the ones that deal with modern American families in the process of dissolution...
...In their variations on themes of sex, guilt, and loss, the stories display a considerable variety of techniques...
...For Updike—if I may twist a line of Wallace Stevens—guilt is the mother of beauty...
...Returning to Africa after his rejection of her, she maintains that opaque placidity that so infuriated him...
...the gaudy parade of eternal loss was about to turn the comer, cymbals clanging, trombones triumphant, and enter her mind...
...The first ostentatiously rejects narrative form for a series of math problems...
...One strangely effective story, "Augustine's Concubine," deals directly with the Saint and his struggle to free himself from his mistress of ten years and the mother of his son...
...Two stories, "Problems" and "GuiltGems," are extreme instances of tendencies found in a number of them...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh JOHN updike has a well-earned reputation as a writer whose sentences fix moments of experience with startling clarity, often with an uncannily well chosen simile or metaphor...
...Guilt Gems" also departs from consecutive narrative, though not so far...
...It was as if her dynamic and egocentric lover, whom she had never failed to satisfy, in his rejection of her had himself failed, and had been rejected, even as his verbal storms swept the Mediterranean and transformed the world...
...Icy, really, because the cold of the winter street never leaves their flesh...
...They are capable of any insight the author chooses to burden them with...
...She grows devout and in her celibate later life draws a conventual community to her...
...The latter two are about Richard and Joan Maple, who have figured in Updike stories reaching*back to the fifties, several of which, including these, were beautifully realized in a television film a year or so ago...
...Those who would shirk it, by way of transactional analysis or one of the other psychological tickles of the Me Decade, become like Tod and Pumpkin, the lovers in another story whose shrinks are their "fairy godfathers": "For Tod was death and Pumpkin was hollow and the fairy godfathers had vanished, taking with them the lovers' best selves...
...The protagonists are middle-aged men, somewhat embarrassed by how well they can see their own situations...
...There is one calculated anachronism: the lady smokes cigarettes...
...That about does it for one strain of American Social History, 1940-1972...
...Even the ones that don't quite c6me off as wholes contain gems—guilt gems, in fact...
...This gives the whole story an odd tilty but to what end I am not sure...
...The very best stories, to my mind, are "Domestic Life in America," "Separating," and "Here Come the Maples...
...As so often in Updike, its relentless sexual explicitness is disheartening and scary...
...In the medium of our sense of having betrayed them, Updike suggests, our children's beauty becomes seraphic, unbearable...
...And he suggests it with such delicacy and grace, such mutually reinforcing compassion and irony, that we receive it as an authentic revelation...
...Problems evades these problems, to a degree...
...The temptation to quote must be resisted here, because it would be hard to know where to stop...
...The rigorous abstraction isolates and intensifies the kernel of anguish in their situation...
...Who could resist a story that begins, "Just before she went away to live with the red-bearded harpsichord-maker, our daughter asked us how to jitter-bug...
...Sometimes the larger designs of his fictions suffer by comparison with the miniaturistic brilliance of their details...
...Guilty...
...Characters— estranged husband and wife, his lover—become A, B, and C. Their lives become accounts that won't balance and geometric configurations of guilt and pain...
...Transaction," which describes an encounter in a hotel between an out-oftown father loaded down with Christmas presents and a hard-faced young prostitute who used to be a librarian, is a guilt gem with a vengeance...
...Since many of them are newly divorced pr about to be divorced and so have just sloughed the skin of their customary lives, they smart at every touch with Updike's own characteristic hypersensitivity...
...The treasure was of inestimable value...
...Here the details-and the large design mesh perfectly in the service of a favorite theme of Updike's, the ways in which fathers fail their sons and daughters...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 6
