No American writer educated himself quite so publicly as John Updike. Prompted by a “dim sense that the humanities and arts need repeated injections of amateurism,” Updike swabbed our arms and gave us the shot monthly. Over four decades he reviewed hundreds of books for the New Yorker and dozens upon dozens of art shows for the New York Review, and he would riff on just about anything for anyone: physics, aging, golf, pennies, photographs, humor, new Chinese writing, how to make a football. He was available, and he was game. Even the AARP newsletter and Massachusetts Golfing Association can call him a contributor.
Every eight or so years Updike compiled these literary errands into a book. They were fat volumes and grew fatter with time, his genial, apologetic prefaces conveying a wide array of excuses for their over-muchness: his Depression Era-born attitude about money, an alimony payment that was “his to make,” curiosity. Updike is not here to aw-shucks over this latest, posthumously published collection, “Higher Gossip,” assembled by Christopher Carduff, but if he were, one imagines he might talk a little bit about aging.
This is not an elderly man’s book, but it is close. The collection begins with a note about touring bookstores in his 70s, and it ends with a brief essay on the sustaining fires of his conflicted Christianity. In between, Updike does what grandparents do. He dives into an increasing number of biographies, eulogizes close friends, and complains about the size of crowds at gallery shows. His generosity and forbearance — which gave his reviews their silken coziness — occasionally falter and a temper flares.
“Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on,” Updike writes in a testy review of the Nobel laureate’s “A Mercy.” “In the age of retirement,” he writes, in a hilarious piece about wintering in Arizona, “we say what we think and ask what we wish.”
It’s a pleasure to encounter this slightly less genteel Updike on the page. Criticism, after all, is often about a collision between sense and sensibility. Updike’s weakness as a critic was that he could be too dutiful, and rather than convey frustration, he would bury the reader in the cotton wool of regurgitated research. “Higher Gossip,” which collects some 170 pages of art reviews, features some striking examples of how excruciatingly boring it could be to follow Updike around a museum when he couldn’t commit to really disliking something.
Updike’s greatest skill — his genius — was in praising, in looking with a kind of devotional attention to the everyday world, and while “Higher Gossip” is marred by some too-kind reviewing, it also happily includes many examples of this brighter side of Updike’s register. There are some familiar affinities — golf and baseball, early American drawing and Edith Wharton — but some surprising ones, too. “Of Carver’s stories,” he writes in a stirring eulogy of the American short story writer, “it must be said they are beautiful. Not since Hemingway, perhaps, has anyone built so lovingly in stacks of plain sentences.” With photographs by Joel Meyerowitz and Robert Polidori of ground zero and New Orleans, respectively, the historic “record is indeed enhanced, for posterity to consult, and to use in ways we cannot imagine.”
This is a large book, and Updike’s prose makes music most of the time. In a piece on surrealism he remarks that “the overturning of conventionality becomes as boring as conventionality.” The preface to a reissued version of his first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair,” contains this gem: “The novel of the future seeks to give us in concentrated form the taste of time that flavors all novels, that makes their events more portentous than events of our own lives, where time passes unnoticed, but for the rare shudder, and the mechanical schedule.”
It was easy to assume that Updike’s voice — so ubiquitous, for so long — would bend the laws of time and continue appearing in the New Yorker forever. “Higher Gossip” reminds those of us who felt this way how foolish we were. Yes, this book could do without the essays on golf, and does it really need to reprint prefaces, the unfunny satirical dialogues? Still, if their inclusion here is the tariff we must pay for another encounter with Updike’s fierce, devotional mind — to read his brilliant description of a football being made at a factory in Ohio — it is small change indeed.
Nonfiction
Blaze: The Forensics of Fire
By Nicholas Faith
St. Martin’s Press, 208 pages
With his last three books, “Blackbox,” “Mayday” and “Crash,” British journalist Nicholas Faith tapped into the seemingly endless appetite for tales of disaster. In “Blaze,” he continues in this macabre vein, this time delving into the forensics of fire, the process of investigating how a fire starts and grows. While he’s no Jon Krakauer — the book has no central narrative, no fleshed-out characters to follow — Faith captures the often glossed-over details of the science of fighting fires.
Faith interviewed firefighters, investigators and survivors of some of the worst fires in recent memory, and “Blaze” splices together these personal accounts with anecdotes culled from the annals of fire history. The result is an engaging look at how investigators discover the cause of ignition, the movement of a fire and, most poignantly, the behavior of people in a fire’s crucial moments.
One insight to emerge from “Blaze” is that deadly fires develop in seemingly innocuous situations. The blaze that destroyed a 38-story skyscraper in Philadelphia in 1991, for example, was traced to a pile of rags soaked in linseed oil. The rag pile created the precise conditions for the linseed oil to spontaneously combust. The resulting inferno caused several hundred million dollars’ worth of damage and claimed the lives of three firefighters.
Other tragedies helped to develop our building codes. The famous 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan was an especially painful lesson. One hundred forty-six women were killed, in part because the building’s exit doors were designed to open inward; the pressure of people trying to get out sealed them shut. Furthermore, many of the doors were locked from the outside to ensure that labor organizers could not infiltrate the factory. Another badly engineered egress — in this case, revolving doors that could not handle heavy volume — contributed to 492 deaths in a fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston in 1942. Building codes were revamped afterward.
The stories of these fires evoke images of crowds stampeding toward exits, but, as Faith argues, often people do not panic soon enough. In one fire, a school principal set off an alarm but then had to go around to classrooms evacuating pupils because none of them believed there really was a fire. In another incident, this one in a Woolworth’s in London, many customers in the cafe refused to leave. One man was quoted as saying, “I’ve waited long enough for this meal, can I finish it?”
In the Woolworth’s fire, smoke was the primary killer, since it knocked people out before they could reach an exit. This often happens in home fires, where nine out of 10 fire deaths occur. A fire investigator re-creates the experience of breathing in lethal fumes:
The first time you encounter the smoke … you can’t open your eyes because as soon as you do they water. You take another breath and the irritants hit the back of your throat. You retch and take a deep breath — it’s a natural involuntary reaction — of these very toxic fumes. That disorients you, puts you down on the floor, and while you’re incapacitated the toxicity takes over. While investigations can determine what materials give off toxic fumes, they rarely shed light on effective ways to catch arsonists. Although the typical B-movie arsonist is out for revenge or profit, there are plenty of other motives, from sheer excitement to crime concealment, Faith shows. In one streak of suspicious blazes, a fire department officer was passed over for a promotion in favor of an older man. His son then set a series of fires, hoping to tire out the chosen man and force him into retirement. Age, however, didn’t deter one septuagenarian from continuing his life of arson. By the time the Center for Arson Research finally tracked him down, he had ignited hundreds of fires as a means of coping with depression and anxiety.
As “Blaze” shows, the men and women who dedicate themselves to fighting and investigating fires have fascinating, heroic stories to tell. But rather than spinning his material into a narrative, as Stewart O’Nan does in his recent book “The Circus Fire,” Faith is content to offer up an eclectic mix of stories and bits of information. It’s more than enough to spark a reader’s interest, but unlike O’Nan’s harrowing yarn, “Blaze” never rises to the level of artifice.
Novels about adolescence rarely come from youths themselves. Twain was 31 when he introduced Americans to Tom Sawyer, Salinger just one year older when the infamous “Catcher in the Rye” came out. So it’s always a shock when a teenager cuts through the Sturm und Drang of adolescence to tell a good story. In his nervy, pocket-sized debut novel, “Crazy,” Munich-native Benjamin Lebert does exactly that. Written when he was just 16, “Crazy” has the whiff of teen spirit, yet the polish and panache of the work of a writer 20 years older.
Meeting Lebert at a lower Manhattan rooming house explains some of this. Pretty quickly, I realize that questions about Christina Aguilera or skateboarding are not going to fly — that in turning this “average shitty day when nothing happens” into a book, the young German has happily hopscotched his way into adulthood. About the only concession he makes to his age are his baby-faced grin and some bright-eyed questions about whether there are indeed wet T-shirt contests in America. Before I can steer him toward the neon lights of Sixth Avenue, Lebert changes gears and starts talking to me about who he is now and how he struggles against what he has come to represent.
Ever since “Crazy” took Germany by storm, being too closely associated with his novel’s narrator (who is named Benjamin, and, like Lebert, suffers from partial paralysis of his left side) has been a problem for Lebert. “These are just my impressions, they’re not intended to speak for all youths. That sort of takes something away from my book. Not all of those things happened. I didn’t go to a Munich bordello. It’s fiction.” In a sometimes breathless present-tense voice, “Crazy” recounts how Lebert’s namesake attends a new boarding school and makes friend with five boys who smoke, drink and philosophize about chasing the “Secret of Life.” Benjamin (the character) loses his virginity in a girls’ lavatory, sneaks off grounds to a strip club and basically dedicates himself to doing something crazy, to becoming a participant in the whole mad mess of life.
Sitting down over Cokes, Lebert seems anything but crazy, shrugging off questions about what it’s like to be footloose in the Big Apple with no adult supervision. He’s been seeing movies — “The Beach” (OK) and “Magnolia” (very good) — and meeting “lots of very nice people.” But he doesn’t seem intent on ravaging the downtown clubs. Being in America is a relief from the constant public attention he gets in Germany. “There was one week where I could go to the newsstands and my picture was on every single newspaper.” Six months after publication, “Crazy” had sold over 180,000 copies. Filming for the movie has already begun. Lebert had a cameo, which has since been cut. “I asked for a cigarette in one scene. I guess it was so bad they got rid of me.”
If anything, Lebert seems intent on entering the literary world, as a writer or editor — he’s not sure which — rather than being its wunderkind. The biggest boon of stardom for him has been getting to meet some of his literary idols, G|nter Grass and America’s most famous ex-wunderkind, Bret Easton Ellis, whom Lebert briefly met at the Frankfurt book fair. “He looked grumpy,” said Lebert. “But so was I, you know, I don’t want to sit through 15 interviews and talk small talk at a book fair all day. I’d rather be playing soccer or something.” As right as that sounds for an 18-year-old, it might be the biggest piece of fiction Lebert’s delivered yet.
Every so often, John
Updike abandons his snow dome of suburban realism to strike
out after new territory. In the past two decades, these forays
have produced the whimsical and wicked tale “The Witches of
Eastwick,” the bawdy but at times pointless “Memoirs of the Ford
Administration” and, three years ago, the futurist “Toward the End of
Time.” But though they’re sometimes cloaked in the garb of
genre fiction, these flights of fancy aren’t the departures they
at first appear to be. They merely find fresh landscapes on which
Updike can rehash his main theme: the symbiotic connection
between sex and death, and the hapless attempts we make to
transcend the latter with the former.
Updike’s 19th novel, “Gertrude and Claudius,” is another such
not-quite-departure, and it is by far the most successful
transplanting of his themes to new soil. The novel borrows its
plot and characters from “Hamlet,” postulating that Gertrude
sealed her union with Claudius long before her first husband was
underground. Using Hamlet’s anger at his mother’s betrayal of his
father as ballast, Updike sails into the foggy circumstances of
Shakespeare’s play and returns with a juicy prequel. Given the
novelist’s exhaustive mappings of the perils of concupiscence, he
is the perfect writer to riff on Shakespeare’s tragedy, which he
manages to do here without usurping the great play’s rightful
primacy.
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As if to signal his respectful distance, Updike begins his tale
using variations on the characters’ names: Gertrude
is Gerutha, Claudius is Feng and King Hamlet is Horwendil. Over
the course of the novel, these unfamiliar names evolve into the
names in the play as Updike begins filching lines from
Shakespeare. His story, which he tells in three parts, opens as
Gertrude’s father is trying to persuade his daughter to marry the
future King Hamlet. Like Ophelia after her, she is stubborn and
independent, yet loyal to a fault. Thus Gertrude agrees to marry
the brute in chain mail and leather epaulets even though he makes
her feel like a comely plot of territory that had once blocked
access to the sea. When they marry, “Denmark had become a
province of her body.”
Thereafter the king becomes aloof, and Gertrude tires of
nurturing the bratty young Hamlet. Longing for some excitement,
she begins spending time with her husband’s brother, Feng
(Claudius), a swarthy, well-traveled free lance with wolfish
teeth, a rug of chest hair and a collection of falcons. As time
passes, she begins to resent forfeiting her life to the king
(whom she and Feng jokingly call the Hammer for his particular
style of making love), a busy man who doesn’t seek to know her
any better. When she hits middle age, Hamlet goes away to school
and, her nest empty, she finally employs Polonius’ services to
start an affair with Claudius.
Updike dives into their affair with alacrity, eliciting both the
sadness and the elation the lovers feel at betraying their family
allegiances in order to honor one of the spirit. As Hamlet will
do later, Claudius succumbs to a decadent possessiveness over
Gertrude, with whom he couples in barnyards and castle anterooms.
After a month of such feverish if furtive exploration — “this
unfolding of herself” — Gertrude exclaims to her lover, “My
father and future husband together bargained me away, and you
have given me back my essential value, the value of that little
girl you so belatedly dote upon.” However offensive this remark
may be to modern notions of female selfhood, it’s sadly in
keeping with the realities of Renaissance England that found
their way into Shakespeare’s play.
In its closing stretches, Updike’s tale leaves the swampy
morasses of the barnyard sex and gathers steam. The affair goes
awry, and Claudius begins plotting for more than just Gertrude’s
bounty. In taking the action of the play beyond its sullen hero’s
point of view, Updike gives us a drama that, with its
machinations of power and its sexual tug of wars, resembles
“Othello” more than it does “Hamlet.” In the end, as in “Othello”
(as well as in most Updikean dramas), those who confuse the loins
with the spirit get a whopping comeuppance. Here Updike has that
ending already carved out for himself in Shakespeare’s tragedy –
and what gory retribution it is.
When Margaret Diehl was 9 years old, her 14-year-old brother was hit and killed by a speeding car. For the next 40 years, Diehl lived in the “shadow” of this event, which she meditates on — and exorcises — in her urgently written memoir, “The Boy on the Green Bicycle.” Riffing wildly and overextending her story’s welcome, Diehl can be maudlin; yet her book is a triumph of honesty. In exploring the depths of her loss, she powerfully evokes what it is to grieve.
Writing like the novelist she is (her previous books include “Men” and “You & Me”), Diehl begins her story with portraits of her family. Her mother comes from the “South of debutantes and the Junior League,” but when we meet her the “South is mostly a place inside her throat”; she is glamorous and wealthy yet vaguely disappointed with her fate. Diehl’s father is full of energy but aloof, with a muted anger toward life; though he is a successful publishing executive, he is ill at ease as a parent. The Diehl’s 22-room home in Montclair, N.J., feels more like an “edifice” than a house. Mr. and Mrs. Diehl are forever coming and going in a cloud of “cosmetics, tobacco, perfume,” while their two boys and two girls — “the proper number” — live in a world of their own.
Using a variety of devices, Diehl recreates the childhood eye with which she sees “the grass squeaky clean but for the rose’s fragrance, the dog’s curled offering. The adults on the flagstone terrace as if on a spaceship somewhere, drinking, smoking cigarettes.” One day her older brother Jimmy — “prankish, clownish” and confident — promises his parents that he will return early from a friend’s house on his new green bike. When he misses his curfew, they refuse to pick him up; he must bicycle home in the dark as punishment. He never makes it. “And so,” Diehl writes, “was stolen the freshness of the world.”
She renders the grieving process awesomely. At first she doesn’t really miss Jimmy; it merely seems as though he is away at camp. Death, after all, “was something that happened to old people and animals.” Then one morning she wakes to the split-second relief of having forgotten, for a night, that Jimmy is dead. Thus she begins to know grief. She scoffs at grown-ups and their fake emotions, yet her parents feel his death even more powerfully than she does. The loss eventually undoes the Diehls, driving Margaret’s mother to drink and her father to self-destruction. After the family moves to an eight-room duplex in New York, Margaret tries to start over. The process ends up taking the rest of her life.
While this is a sad, sad, story, something wonderful emerges from it: Margaret’s discovery of her consciousness as a writer. In examining “the honeycomb of [her] inner world, the sinewy power of consciousness,” she learns what it will someday take to write her story. And in offering up this memoir, Diehl brings grief horribly, humanely, realistically — and bravely — to life.
