SALON Interview: John Updike, page 2

John Updike, page 2

There's a place in the new book where you say, "Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe." Is that still true?

No, they don't keep you so safe anymore. I just saw a picture called "Leaving Las Vegas" in which very little mitigation is offered. A guy just resolves to drink himself to death, and slowly does. And he rather unaccountably attracts the attention of a very pretty Las Vegas hooker who decides she loves him and ... I don't know. It's a story without any turn in it. There's no point as to any real resistance. An old-fashioned Hollywood movie would have taken that guy, and at least at one point he would have looked at the girl and said, "Why am I doing this? Why am I destroying myself? I'm unfair to you, let alone myself." He might have failed in the end.
I forget how "The Lost Weekend" worked out, actually. But that was another story of alcoholism, in which you felt a struggle. There's no struggle here. No struggle. In the end, the movie felt to me a little flat, and French. It was rubbing our noses somehow. Rubbing our noses in something, rather than offering us a way out. In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.

Are there any younger filmmakers whom you do admire? What do you think of Quentin Tarantino, for example?

"Pulp Fiction" was in a way a very arresting film. I thought it was too long, and it catered to the worst in us, in a funny way. Yet it was original. But it's not like I would keep rushing out to see the new Tarantino, in the way I do still rush to see the new Woody Allen. Woody Allen, I guess, cannot qualify as the new generation of anything. But he is for me the only American, like Bergman and Fellini and Antonioni, who can be said to be making a personal statement. His movies are like a novelist's novels. They are variations of a single vision, and they have a kind of personal element. They're not all good. In fact, Woody Allen has his limits. If you read him as a writer, you see that he has his limits. On the other hand, as a filmmaker you feel there's a more direct connection. There are not a lot of bankers and agents and advisors in (his) way. I guess that's what I don't like about the movies. That being group art, you tend to get kind of committee-think operating. But it's not like I'm a guy who spends a week out at the Sundance Festival, either.

Speaking of different sensibilities, at the end of your new novel you acknowledge many sources that were helpful in writing the book, including many histories and books about film. You also thank Brett Easton Ellis's novel "Less Than Zero." And I guess I'm curious to know what you looked for, or found, in that book.

I know it was sort of impish, really, since that's the only novel I thank. But I needed to know a little more about the sort of burnt-out generation of Hollywood-Los Angeles kids, and that was the first text that occurred to me. There may be other novels. But at least I got the names out of that -- the restaurants and places these kids might go. And it was about right for the age of my character Clark; the '70s and '80s were when he was bumming around. So I read it. Actually when I got into the book, it's basically about the hero going to an Eastern college. What was useful to me were only the restaurants and some Los Angeles geography. And some sense of how these kids spend their day.

How did the book hold up as literature?

Frankly, it's not a great book. And kind of theatrical in a funny way. A little like "Leaving Las Vegas," it was saying: "Hey, this is really ultimate cool, isn't it? To get wasted and stay wasted." Nevertheless he's not a hack, and he did write out of a kind of vision. It's a very young man's book -- kind of a "Catcher in the Rye," or something, for his generation. I read it with respect, but I really treated it as a manual on yesterday's zonked, stoned youth.

Ellis aside, are there writers of his generation whose work you admire?

I don't doubt they exist. My reading tends to be either still trying to master the classics, or reading a certain number of books to review. And I'm given an increasingly eclectic bunch of titles to review these days. Deborah Eisenberg struck me as a writer with really something new to say about female experience. It may be generation specific, and her generation isn't generation X. I think she's in her younger 40s, so that's my idea of a younger writer who's gifted. Another writer is Thom Jones, who writes about violence and being crazy and yet does so in a persuasive and brightly colored way. It's not a pleasant universe, exactly, but it is a universe. They've both been published in The New Yorker; I fear that remains my main source text for what's going on in young writing. They're looking for young writing.

Has The New Yorker changed much under TIna Brown, in terms of the kind of fiction it is looking for?

Quite a lot. And I'd have to be an editor myself to know in exactly what way. But in terms of what they publish ... There was a kind of story of sensibility -- Elizabeth Tallent, Anne Beattie -- that I don't think they have much use for now. They kind of go for more pow, more zap. The limits are off as far as words you can use and experiences you can describe. I mean, somebody's homosexual initiation was in an issue a while ago. No doubt there have been some rapes. Really they're expanding. When I think of the old New Yorker ... not only could you not use the Anglo-Saxon word for, but you couldn't use even the medical term for, penis. It was a word that just wouldn't appear in The New Yorker because they didn't want to think about it. They'd rather edit it out of the universe.
I think they are also looking for stories that are in some way arresting. Just as their nonfiction tends to be arresting. I mean, stories about the guys in porno movies, for example. All kinds of sensational or startling ... So I think it's changed. They're certainly looking for young writers who can speak to today's youth. The few people like me plug away. But basically it's more highly colored, and very legitimately they're looking for stories that reflect how people live now, how people feel now.

Do you share the current pessimism about the state of American publishing? That there are fewer readers of literary fiction, and that young writers who aren't immediately successful have a difficult time getting their second and third books published?

I think that's correct. Again I have very little knowledge, just a sense of it. I think that the kind of readers that would make it worthwhile to print a literary writer are dwindling. People seem to read more purely for escape than when I was younger. You look at the books that people are reading on an airplane, and you never see a book that you would want to read. It's always these fat thrillers by John Grisham or Stephen King or names I can't even conjure up. Danielle Steele. It's discouraging, really, if you're a so-called literary writer. Not that Stephen King is in another part of the universe -- it's the same universe, it's just kind of a different corner of it. There are some (serious readers), heaven knows, and the book critics tend to be of this sort. So you find book reviewers living in another world from the bestseller list. That can't be too healthy. When a literary book does get on the bestseller list it's usually because it's sensational in some way, like "Lolita" or "Portnoy's Complaint."

In other words, there's a greater gap between what we think of as literary fiction and what people are actually reading.

When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop -- it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word. They're less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad. It's momentarily uphill, I would say.
And who's to blame? Well, everything's to blame. Movies are to blame, for stealing a lot of the novel's thunder. Why read a novel when in two hours you can just go passively sit and be dazzled and amazed and terrified? Television is to blame, especially because it's come into the home. It's brought the fascination of the flickering image right into the house; like turning on a faucet, you can have it whenever you want. I was a movie addict, but you could only see so many movies in the course of a week. I still had a lot of time to read, and so did other people. But I think television would take all your day if you let it. Now we have these cultural developments on the Internet, and online, and the computer offering itself as a cultural tool, as a tool of distributing not just information but arts -- and who knows what inroads will be made there into the world of the book.
This all sounds very gloomy, and you may ask: Why is this man smiling? Well, I love writing and I'm getting toward the end of my writing career. I'm grateful, really, that I'm not trying to begin now. It will be done: there will be writers, there will be readers. But for the moment you can't say the world of print is hot, where it's at. It's a kind of pleasant backwater in a way.

How do you think your generation of writers will be assessed? Are you sometimes surprised at the books that have, or haven't, held up?

Of course, it's changing. An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray? There's a constant elimination and revision of my generation, and maybe the generation ahead, what you might call the post-war writers. I would think that Bellow, if anybody, would be there, because there's really a wonderful gift. And I think some of Phillip Roth, I don't know quite what. "Portnoy"? I don't know. Donald Barthelme? Is he read now, by people of your age?

Not widely, no.

He's become a curiosity. John Barth?

He seems tangential as well. His kind of intellectual fripperies don't seem to be for everyone.

He's very special, yes. I would repeat that Bellow has always seemed to me -- I've reviewed all of his books, and not all of them favorably -- but I think that the basic prose, and the basic sense of life, is tremendous. Bernard Malamud is an author who maybe isn't mentioned every breath now, but who I think in "The Assistant" wrote a wonderful book, a book better, to my mind, than "The Great Gatsby," and about that length. I'm trying to think of the women ... Mary McCarthy's short stories. Well, she's not exactly of this generation. Very hard to say. In general, I think the movements which gave critics something to sink their teeth in, the so-called Imperial Fiction, you know, when everyone was writing 800-page novels, I think those will hold up less well, oddly enough, than those that were harder to label. It may be because I was that kind of writer, so maybe I want to believe that. There are fads in critical fashion, but a writer at his peril strays too far from realism. Especially in this country, where realism is kind of our thing. Writing that gives you the real texture of how things look and how people acted. At least there's something there beyond your self and your own wits to cling to, a certain selflessness amid the terrible egoism of a writer.

You're one of the very few among your generation to produce a large, significant body of criticism. Has this helped you as a novelist? Or are they ultimately separate spheres?

No, I like to think that's it's helped me, actually. At times it's been a distraction. How many short stories would I have written with the energy with which I wrote those reviews? Some, probably. But on the other hand it has varied my own reading, and has compelled me to do a little thinking. I've tried to use the critic's robes as an excuse to get acquainted with my national classics -- I've kind of worked up Melville, and Hawthorne, and Whitman as a critic. So in that way it's been self-educational. I've also used it as a way of reading what the Europeans and Latin Americans are doing. So I've tried to temper or flavor my own Americanness with some sense of world literature. And I think I've become a more versatile writer because of that. These writers who do nothing but think American -- in this global age, it becomes a very narrow pea-patch indeed.
I couldn't have written "In the Beauty of the Lilies," probably, had I not done an awful lot of critical stuff. Because in a way, it's a thesis novel that involved a certain amount of research. So I'd like to think that's it's made me a little more confident as an intellectual, and a little more experimental.

Do you still read your own critics, and find that your responses to them have changed over time?

(Laughs) I don't make a fetish of reading the reviews. But I am sent them and find it a little beyond my limits of austerity not to read them. And some of them are troubling. Some of them make good and no doubt valid negative points. This book has gotten some very strong reviews, and some ho-hum reviews. It's mixed. But in general I can't complain about the critical reception of this book. It doesn't really, in the end, help much. The way I handle a bad review, or even a good one, is to file it. I have files for all the books. And I find that once I tear it out and put it in the file it in some way takes the sting out.
You can't really write to please critics, because you're not going to please them, probably, even if you try to write for them. For example, I was enough aware of feminist criticisms that my novels always had these same male, sexist, lusty heroes that I did try to write a book involving women as heroes, "The Witches of Eastwick." But I'm not aware of any feminist celebration of this novel. On the contrary, they didn't like that either.

I remember, when I was in college, that you certainly weren't the most politically correct novelist to be reading. Does that rankle you at all?

Luckily I don't teach at a college, and when I go to a college I'm very hospitably treated. So I've been sheltered from that. I am a white male born at a certain time, probably with some of the sexist baggage of men of my age and vocation. But I can't believe that I'm misogynist. Rather the contrary. Bright, clever, good women have played a major part in my life, and in my way I've tried to be sympathetic and depict the plight of women in our society. Our society is still, at bottom, patriarchicial. But maybe they are right. Why do I keep writing about these phallocentric guys like Rabbit Angstrom? I've written a couple of books involving women, and really the hero of "Lilies" is female. She's the one who really reverses the family's destinies and gets to the stars, or as close as you can get to the stars in this life.

One more question about critics: What was it like being the subject of one of the strangest appraisals of a writer that I've ever read -- Nicholson Baker's "U & I"? Do you remember first picking it up?

(Laughs) I was sent a photocopy of the manuscript. Random House sent it to me, I think, to see if I was going to raise a fuss. But I was trying to be a writer at the time; I glanced at it and thought it would merely distract me. And when I sat down and read the book, of course it's a very friendly and amusing book, I thought. And it's not exactly about me. He talks about all the books of mine he hasn't read, and explains why. It's a good long essay on how younger writers use older ones. You use what you want, and you very selectively take what you need. It actually has enhanced my reputation -- it has done me a favor, that book, because it's a book like few others. It's an act of homage, isn't it? And he's a good writer, and he brings to that book all of his curious precision, the strange Bakeresque precision.
I like him. I think he's an example of a younger writer with a real gift and vocation. And he does have a public. I believe there are people out there who buy Baker's books -- the nerds of the world buy Baker (laughs). But again, you feel sort of sorry for him, because the real climate of book publishing would seem to tolerate a few Bakers but not really to encourage them. It's an act of character for him to remain true to himself. He has a book of essays coming out, actually, in which he's followed his own pedantic tendencies to an extreme. It's an amusing, very entertaining book.

He's become a writer, as well, who has his female critics. I know many women who were furious after reading "The Fermata."

It was pretty fierce -- fiercer than anything you'll find in any of my fictions. Some of those sex scenes (laughs)... wiping your sperm out of a woman's eyelashes is kind of ... new. But what can you do? In a way you're stuck in your own gender, and you have to sing your own song in the end. And you can't be too worried about the essentially political reactions. He's a very gentle and courteous guy who probably keeps these impulses for the written page. So women should be grateful for that -- that he's not out there raping and pillaging (laughs).

You write in the introduction to the new Everyman's Library edition of the Rabbit books that Rabbit Angstrom was your "ticket to America," a way of seeing the country through different eyes. Watching the Republican primaries now, do you ever wish you could climb into his head once again and talk about what is going on?

I don't know how Harry Angstrom would react, what he would make of this present shift to the right. He did kind of like Reagan. He tends to like all presidents, I think.

He's patriotic.

He's patriotic, right, and he will stick with the president. For myself, I must say, I don't much like it. I find it creepy and un-American, what's happening, as far as I can tell. This kind of politics of resentment.

Final question: Many of your books deal, at least glancingly, with cultural overload -- the sense that we're bombarded with so much information now, it's hard to know what's important and what isn't. I think there's a line in your new book where you say, "Information will break your heart in the end." To extend that to the presidency, I wonder if you're interested, as someone who has written so much about adultery, in what's happening to Bill Clinton -- having a sitting president accused of adultery. Do we know too much about our leaders now?

It doesn't trouble me in the slightest. I don't doubt that he behaved like what they call an Alpha Male at a certain phase of his life. He is after all, of that generation, which embraced promiscuity as a kind of salvation. If Hillary can put up with it, I can. I'd be very surprised if his conduct now were anything but exemplary. I don't feel that, unlike Jack Kennedy, he's doing anything other than working hard at being a good president. And I think we just have to forgive him whatever ... That even sounds presumptuous.
I think he is being pursued by this one case. (Paula Jones) is being financed by anti-Clinton interests and, to me, all my indignation is basically against all the people that won't let the guy alone and be president. He won it fair and square, he's shown a good deal of ability to be president, and it's a sad world when we're so happy to harass a public servant like that. Unlike a lot of people, I have no negative (feelings about Clinton). Clinton seems to rub people the wrong way. And I don't quite know why. I can't totally empathize with anyone who wants to be president. It seems to me a terrible, thankless job. And to get there is horrendous. We've made it horrendous. But he seems to want to be president, so I say, good for him.

What's your favorite Updike book? Is Clinton really an "Alpha male"? Is popular literature a thing of the past? And what would Rabbit think of today's candidates? Join the conversation in "Books" in Table Talk.