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Letter to the editor

Updike: The energizer critic

John Updike's new book of criticism refreshes with bracing vigor, tireless wit.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Book Editor
Published November 11, 2007

It's pretty daunting to review John Updike's 59th book, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism.

Updike, 75, has dwelt among the highest ranks of American fiction writers for almost half a century, producing a prodigious crop of beautifully written novels and short stories that capture, arguably as well as the work of any writer, his generation's experiences. He has won enough Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards and other assorted honors to fill a trophy room.

He is also a prolific, intelligent and generous critic of other people's writing. Regularly in the New Yorker and often in other venues, he writes reviews and essays about books new and old, fictional and factual.

He does so with such energy that this is his sixth collection of essays and literary criticism he has also published two collections of art criticism. This book gathers the work of about eight years - some 700 pages' worth, produced during a time period when he also published four novels, three short story collections, a volume of poetry and another of art criticism.

Excuse me, I need to lie down for a minute.

Better now. As I was saying, it's daunting to play the critic to a critic like Updike. His breadth and depth of knowledge about the art of writing - not to mention his standing as one of its finest practitioners - gives one pause.

For those of us who review books (endangered species that we are), Due Considerations is best taken as master class. For anyone else who loves books, it's simply a treasure trove.

Some of the most enlightening pieces are gathered in the chapter "Introductions," 13 essays Updike wrote as introductions to recent editions of well-known books (and a couple of photo collections).

In his introduction to the 150th anniversary edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Updike gets directly to the point in the first sentence: "A century and a half after its initial publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mind-set, and Thoreau so vivid a protestor, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book itself risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."

It is not unread by Updike, though, who goes on to place book and author in their historic and cultural context with humor, affection and respect. He reminds us of what that perfect crank was truly up to: "Thoreau's purpose is to reconcile us, after centuries of hazy anthropocentrism, to Nature as it is, relentless and remorseless. We need to be called out from the shared comforts and illusions of village life." It's a sharp insight, particularly from a writer whose life's work has been the examination of those shared comforts and illusions, no matter how large and sophisticated the village.

In his introduction to The Portrait of a Lady, he takes a surgeon's scalpel to all the intellectual weight and choked emotions of Henry James' fiction: "Money is what the tall vaults of James' novels, with their portentous intimate betrayals and conspiracies cloaked in the velvet language of politeness, rest upon. His grand tone veils an ignoble scramble for money among people incapable of earning any."

A chapter titled "Monuments" takes a clear-eyed look at everything from the Pentateuch to The Wizard of Oz. Here Updike performs a graceful rebalancing act in his evaluation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. On the one hand, he raises an elegant brow at the tone of the recent annotated version by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, in which snark like "Without good looks or interesting verbiage to keep us interested, I am close to turning the page" passes for scholarly annotation. On the other hand, he counters Jane Smiley's excess of enthusiasm for Cabin in her notorious essay "Say It Ain't So, Huck," in which she argued that Stowe's book would have been a finer inspiration for American literature than Mark Twain's masterpiece.

Due Considerations includes more than 50 reviews of recent novels, biographies, nonfiction and more. The range is impressive, as is Updike's ability to draw readers into even the most complex books. His review of Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin is a case in point. He begins by helpfully breaking down its intricate, multilayered plot into five levels, then goes on to praise Atwood's poetic use of language and consider how her feminism influences the book's relationships - then whacks us upside the head, just as Atwood does, with the book's final, coolly brilliant bleakness.

Not all of Due Considerations is literary criticism. There are essays on travel, architecture and religion, as well as charming short personal pieces about poker and cars. One chapter is devoted to lovely essays about James Thurber and E.B. White, who were, like Updike, on the New Yorker staff. And he's unable to resist tucking in a few pieces about art, from works by Durer and Bruegel to cartoons by Saul Steinberg and William Steig.

The book's final chapter, "Personal Considerations," consists of a variety of short pieces: Updike's forewords to some of his own works, brief articles written for magazines on topics such as his education at Harvard, a very funny interview of himself conducted by his fictional creation Henry Bech.

Among them is an account of his childhood reading, in which he remembers that books recommended by adults, from Alice in Wonderland to Ulysses, always scared the bejesus out of him. He turned with joy to mysteries, science fiction, humor, devouring them by the shelf full.

"My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, as it is yet," he writes. "I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know." Surveying the reach of this collection, I'm grateful Updike hasn't been scared off very often.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

By John Updike

Knopf, 703 pages, $40

[Last modified November 7, 2007, 17:56:29]