Exploring Suburbia
DEEMER, CHARLES
Exploring Suburbia Museums and Women and Other Stories By John Updike Knopf282 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer Truman Capote has complained of John...
...what raises Updike's better fiction above the commonplace is his bringing to suburbia the same crying "What is it...
...the brontosaurus was coming up the path"for ultimately they become sterile exercises in technique...
...Updike is not blind to his problem as a writer...
...House...
...Indeed, Capote's charge of superficiality does not hold for Updike's treatment of this unhappy couple: Everything goes beneath the surface because neither of them is capable of articulating what has gone wrong with their lives or their marriage...
...For example, confronting "the sea" as an object, he says, "I wish it to yield only on the point of its identity...
...In the oldest of the 29 stories and "other modes" included in his new volume, he poses issues that too few authors face up to: "It is a chronic question, whether to say simply 'the sea' and trust to people's imaginations, or whether to put in the adjectives...
...If this answer does not remove the loss and pain of lives we might call trite, it is nevertheless there and we must try to feel it...
...The design of the stories is always skillful and sometimes witty, to the point that on occasion one wonders whether the people really matter, compared to the edifice giving them reason to be at the same place at the same time...
...Updike's favorite narrative strategy in these stories is to isolate an object or fixture A hill, a rabbit, a dangerous intersection, a deck of cards, even the plumbing under a house And to bring the characters into a relationship with it...
...This is the same question Herman Melville asked himself in Pierre before his long silence as a novelist...
...Searching for the large, full answer, Updike is frequently a symbolist, making connections instead of distinctions, finding everything in something...
...These experiments, however, are not saved by their wit The iguanodon's high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split...
...But are they to be trusted...
...captures their sadness as if it were an object...
...To lose faith in language is a writer's act of suicide...
...In the end, his relationship with museums and women is identical: ". . . it came to me that nothing about museums is as splendid as their entrances the sudden vault, the shapely cornices, the motionless uniformed guard like a wittily disguised archangel, the broad stairs leading upward into heaven knows what mansions of expectantly hushed treasure...
...Here the characters are obviously more important to the author than the design into which he fits a small portion of their lives...
...I have had only fair luck with people's imaginations...
...that he took to the sea...
...Updike is far more successful when he stays in his proper territory, as in the five stories that end this collection, where he portrays the evolving marriage of Richard and Joan Maple, showing us the juxtaposition of the "elemental constituents" that make them what they have become: "Woman...
...The success of each, it seems to me, depends on how much the reader comes to trust that the relationships between the characters are more than mere coincidence...
...Yet Updike Asking as of the sea, "What is it...
...Thus it is not surprising to find Updike taking the people out and replacing them with prehistoric animals in such "other modes" as "Under the Microscope" and "During the Jurassic...
...There's something wrong when you're aware all the time of the writing, don't you think...
...Although he keeps the faith, Updike is aware of the limitations of sheer description...
...Since he doesn't say, the critics attack...
...Are they words Anything substantial upon which we can rest our weight...
...Its breadth, its glitter, its greenness and sameness balk me...
...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer Truman Capote has complained of John Updike's work: "All the effects are on the surface, with nothing underneath...
...The reason he is so often underrated, I would venture, is that he explores the private lives, the hopes and losses and despairs, of people about whom it has become fashionable to think nothing at all, so obviously trite and shallow and empty are they and their little escapes into late-night parties and afternoon adulteries believed to be...
...hence tend to trust adjectives...
...Updike's usual subject, of course, as the stories collected here demonstrate, is not the sea, but rather woman and man in contemporary suburban America...
...For years critics have lamented that Updike has yet to find "his proper subject matter," that his prodigious vocabulary has too little to say...
...In the title story, the narrator as a boy is taken to a museum by his mother, later meets his future wife at a museum, and still later visits a museum with his mistress...
...If I knew, I could say...
...What is it...
...What is it...
...It is admittedly a cliche to observe that much of middle-class existence in America is not really very happy...
...I can't remember what one of his stories is about when I've finished it...
...Capote is not alone in his demand for "more matter and less art...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
