Updike in Africa
MERKIN, DAPHNE
WritersckWriting UPDIKE N AFRICA BY DAPHNE MERKIN ^ ohn Updike flits among the various literary modes the way other people change dress: He has published four volumes of poetry and a play; when...
...She falls in love with Ezana and immediately plies him with humorously American demands for unbounded intimacy: '"I don't feel I know you...
...the narrator suffers the majestic fool in himself honestly if not gladly, and his account is pervaded throughout with the innate embarrassment of private dreams...
...The American scenes (Ellelou has conveniently spent some time at a small college in Franchise) have about them the pungency that last wafted through Lolita...
...And these books of larger vision, despite not always being persuasive, are in fact the author's most interesting works...
...A young American envoy had gone up in flames along with the Total and Corn Curls, and his widow, Mrs...
...The time is 1973, although according to ElleloQ's calculations it is "the Year of the Prophet 1393...
...Ursula's Grammar School and challenges the Sisters' certitude of an all-just God with examples of blatant injustice: "When pressed like this the nuns would say the matter was a Mystery...
...This new crowd in power doesn't have any of your irony...
...w ? ? RTNKLEs, by Charles Simmons, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 182 pp., $8.95) is free of the self-indulgence that usually bloats confessional novels...
...They settle in Nice, "amid the singing of the beach pebbles and the signing of autographs by topless young leftovers from the Cannes Film Festival...
...Ellelou is an endearing but violent fellow...
...Still, as Delmore Schwartz observed, even paranoids have real enemies: The oily Ezana is in cahoots with insurrectionary forces that would like to restore Kush to the good graces of its expelled American benefactors, the source of breakfast-cereal and Carnation milk that the fanatic Ellelou ordered his soldiers to burn...
...He grows up with a quiet albeit persistent sense of human limitations that will shadow his adult relationships and circumscribe his joy in them: "His mother gave him everything he wanted, within reason, so that he became careful not to take advantage of her...
...after his marriage broke up he saw that expectations of compensatory justice were being satisfied...
...The Colonel is driven around his drought- and famine-stricken nation in a silent gray Mercedes...
...This King Lear-like scenario is telling...
...When he publishes a novel his achievement is marred by his wary egotism: "He had a literary success, which brought out qualities he had not seen in people before: some fawned on him frightenedly...
...Signs of aging—"a whiteness to the skin of his inner arms, a looseness around the eyes so that they do not express his moods"—disturb him, again in contrast to the secretly nurtured image: "He will have hoped to age into a rosy craggi-ness...
...Or perhaps something less tangible and more complicated is involved—a subtle clash between artistic ability and artistic inclination, between what John Updike is best equipped to write about and what he wants to writeabout...
...Simmons' lapidary style is unusually effective in etching the gnaw of unfulfillment...
...Gibbs, a traitorous Kutunda, and a puppet-figure called Dorfu...
...when he is not writing novels he is turning out short stories...
...He marries and becomes the father of two daughters...
...Franchise was a middle-sized city of 35,000----The lake had been left, with that romantic douceur the Americans trail in the wake of their rapacities, its Indian name, Timme-bago...
...his chauffeur, Mtesa, speaks the kind of pronounless English that used to be assigned to actors playing Chinese roles in the movies: '"Broad road up from plains...
...This watch fascinated his subordinates, who wondered where, in its scanty black depths, the device coiled the many minutes it was not called upon to display...
...Yet while Updike is gifted at everything he puts his hand to, he is not equally gifted...
...Following the advice of his mistress, Kutunda, he beheads Edumu, whom he has kept alive out of a rhapsodic (rhapsody is Ellelou's mother-tongue) sense of gratitude: '"He took me up when I was less than a grain of sand, a soldier with falsified papers and set me at his side...
...More specifically, he seeks to abandon his natural subjects—disgruntled marriages (Couples, Marry Me) and crumbling Wasp traditions (A Month of Sundays)—for darker, archetypal matters—alien accounts of wandering Jews (Bech: A Book) and militant blacks (Rabbit Redux...
...He appears to aspire, indeed, to be every kind of writer—a man for all readers...
...As a forlorn yet dignified acknowledgment of the trouble and waste that fissure the pattern of most of our lives, Wrinkles triumphs over the very disappointments that engendered it...
...later, after his divorce, he falls in and out of love with a young woman: "Now that things do not go well with him and the younger woman, he pictures a son whom the mother would enlist in disputes with him and who would tell him he is useless and should die...
...More important, here John Updike comes closer than he has ever come before to matching the intention to the act...
...He casts about for personal significance in recognition of encroaching death and resorts, touchingly, to bravura: '"My sex life,' he will tell a young male interviewer at lunch after two drinks, 'was troubled and full of waste but triumphant.'" Wrinkles is a partial autobiography of a partially-eclipsed life...
...They're grim!'" Ellelou is arrested and imprisoned "as a traitor, an exhibitionist, and an indigent...
...wife, the chic Sittina, and her "variegated children...
...The Coup is a very witty book about the merchandising of ideology...
...He suspects as well his minister of the interior, Michaelis Ezana, a dandy bedecked in the very gimmicks of modernity that Ellelou abhors: "On his wrist he wore a Swiss watch of which the face, black, lit up with the hour and minute in Arabic numerals when a small side button was pressed...
...1 would sooner spill the blood of my true father----"' The Colonel is also a raving paranoid...
...In a diplomatic gesture—"We must show our friends the Americans that we too value the office above the man"—the coalition allows the ex-President to leave Kush together with his third (or is it fourth...
...others waited for signs of overreaching and humiliated him when they occurred...
...It is almost as though Updike had to figuratively leave home—by impersonating the foreigner—in order to see most clearly into the frailties of home: "Everything in America, through that middle bulge of the Fifties, seemed to this interloper fat, abundant, and bubblelike, from the fenders of the cars to the cranium of the President...
...The unnamed "he" attends St...
...But the story is not yet over: "Colonel Ellelou is rumored to be working on his memoirs...
...one nun used the word Mystere, explaining that it was French for certain profound and beautiful turning points in theology...
...Thus, although he is a first-rate miniaturist (his short stories are usually flawless, and his criticism can be truly remarkable—witness Picked-lip Pieces), he has failed to attain major status as a novelist...
...At 18 he enlists in the Army and discovers how little he likes military regimen or his comrades...
...Gibbs, eventually arrives to seek retribution...
...It is inventive in a Nabokovian way: nothing is too big—or small—to be poked fun at...
...He made me a son, when he had fifty sons already...
...Some secret you're withholding.'" Returning from one of his forays, Colonel Ellelou finds a governing coalition of Ezana, Mrs...
...The Coup (Knopf, 299 pp., $8.95), Updike has heroically reincarnated himself in the form of one Colonel ElleloQ, a crazed, anti-Western leader of the mythical African substate of Noire, now renamed Kush...
...He wishes, in the way that certain people obliquely do, to become someone other than himself: "He studied the older boys and admired those he thought were handsome, helpful, and modest...
...when he is not doing any of these you can catch him reviewing books in the New Yorker...
...In 40-odd "chapters" that draw an arc from boyhood through current middle age to projected old age, Simmons invokes the confounded quality of ordinary life—first as a son, then a husband and lastly a lover...
...Candy, the second of Elleloii's wives, who hails from Franchise, Wisconsin, tries to warn him: '"You really must get out of Kush...
...He hoped to be like them, but when the time came he wasn't...
...With his latest novel...
...He fears capitalist infiltration, suspecting the secretaries working in the "Palais d'Administration des Noires" of "wearing elastic Western underwear, spicy brands called Lollypop and Spanky...
...Mtesa has a rough time keeping an inconspicuous tail on his wandering boss, who decks himself out in various tattered disguises the better to mix among his starving subjects...
...Speaking alternately in the first and third person, the protagonist recounts the chaotic history of the recent "L 'Emergence," the revolution in which he brought a hybrid "Islamic socialism" to Kush after ousting the corrupt King Edumu IV (who had subscribed to Life magazine and even in prison decorates his walls with framed portraits of Western celebrities—"Elvis Presley in full sequined regalia, Marilyn Monroe from a bed of polar bear skins making upward at the lens the crimson O of a kiss whose mock emotion led her to close her greasy eyelids...
...Perhaps his is a case of talent spread too thin to sustain the rigors of full-length fiction...
...Well-marked, all tourist services...
...Flecked with sobriety and whimsy, The Coup counters a concern for temps perdu with a muscular sense of presentness...
...Michael, even in bed I feel it...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 24
