After reading 600 crisp, new pages of John Updike, I can honestly say, without filial obligation or Knopfian ties, that Updike is America’s greatest living author. In 1997, Margaret Atwood wrote of Updike, “Surely no American writer has written so much, for so long, so consistently well. Such feats tend to be undervalued. They shouldn't be.” With Atwood I agree, which is why I am reviewing not one, but two Updike compilations – one of poetry, the other prose.
Americana and Other Poems is rather thin when compared to Updike's last poetic tome [Collected Poems 1953-1993], but it makes up for its minimal length with oceanic depth. Filled with poems about American cities, air travel, and aging, this collection deftly chronicles John Updike’s continued journey as an American author.
Wearing literary glasses of gleaming clarity, Updike views the world through an introspective microscope, noting occurrences both awe-inspiring and mundane. Without altering his own sophisticated style, Updike pays homage to Whitman and Kerouac with poems titled “On the Road” and “Song of Myself,” and perpetuates an American wiry-bearded beat theme by gracing the back cover of Americana with a photo by Allen Ginsberg. Updike then continues his patriotic ode by writing numerous poems about American towns.
In “Phoenix” Updike describes the Arizonan city both brutally and beautifully:
From Phoenix, Updike travels “Near Clifton, Perhaps,” where “the gas stations have no maps for sale, as if / the territory’s as impossible to map / as female sexuality,” and then from these mapless gas stations, Updike travels to “New York City” - a “hell [that] holds sacred crevices where lone / lost spirits preen and call their pit a throne.”
In order to travel from American city to American town, Updike must fly, and, therefore, he must write about planes. In “The Overhead Rack,” Updike soars away from an unnamed place, and with angered words chides the “…bland faced graduates / of business school, trained to give each other / and the rest of the world the business.” He views these “smug smooth bastards” as “fat corpuscles in the nation’s bloodstream.” A thought both unforgiving and true.
When John Updike tires of writing about his travels, he looks internally for poetic themes; in “Song of Myself,” he ponders sleeping and death:
Whether John Updike is discussing dreams and mortality, businessmen and airplanes, or golf courses and retirees, he consistently sketches the microscopic details that compose our world – the paramecia of societal being. His poems read like finely crafted prose - delectable morsels meant to be savored - and conversely, his fiction reads like poetry. Updike makes two genres one.
Moving from prose poetry to poetic prose, The Complete Henry Bech, a compilation of twenty stories published between 1970 and 1999, chronicles the life of Henry Bech, a Jewish writer, world-traveler, and murderer of caustic literary critics. Henry Bech is the antithesis of Updike’s most famous recurring character, Rabbit Angstrom; Bech is not a middle-class everyman from Pennsylvania, but a worldly Manhattan novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize. Bech doesn’t sell cars; he sells ideas.
John Updike writes about Bech with his customary eloquence, narrating an aging author’s existence, not unlike his own. From the Scottish Highlands to the streets of Jerusalem, Henry Bech lives an interesting life footnoted with shrewd perceptions. On the Highlands, Bech notes the desolation created by man and nature; “Atrocity leaves no trace on earth…Nature shrugs, and regroups.” There was nothing but “mile after mile of tummocky brown turf unrolled with no more than an occasional river or lake for punctuation.”
In Jerusalem, Bech and his then-wife Bea followed the footsteps of Jesus, but instead of being moved by religious significance, Bech’s “artist’s eye, always was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him – Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where he thirsted.” Bech and Bea often disagreed about Jerusalem’s modern-day significance, and, with wit and humor, Updike describes the pair’s tense relationship. For instance, when Bea answered a question posed to Bech, he “was as startled as if one of his ribs had suddenly chirped” - a clever description both comical and theologically apropos.
In addition to his humorous imagery and perceptive descriptiveness, Updike infuses The Complete Henry Bech with sex. In “Bech Swings,” Bech “tried to crush her [a woman named Merissa] into himself. To suck the harlot’s roses from her cheeks. He slobbered on her wrists, pressed his forehead against the small of her spine. He did all this in ten-point type, upon the warm white paper of her sliding skin.” Updike intertwines Bech’s loves of literature and women in a sensual and inspired style.
In “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden” Updike’s inspired style [this time platonic] reaches a crescendo. Bech’s acceptance speech of The Nobel Prize is eloquent and odd; The Nobel Prize “lifts one up … to a terrible height, a moment of global attention, and tempts one to pontificate.” But Bech doesn’t. Instead, he allows his infant daughter to give a speech titled “The Nature of Human Existence:”
John Updike writes with descriptiveness and insight that is rarely seen. His prose and poetry are so textually lush, they are almost interchangeable. Few authors of such literary weight have written so prolifically [53 books and counting], and whether it be Americana, a Henry Bech collection, or any other of his works, I recommend picking up an Updike book and slowly digesting his genius. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
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*Originally published in the Charleston City Paper.
Americana and Other Poems is rather thin when compared to Updike's last poetic tome [Collected Poems 1953-1993], but it makes up for its minimal length with oceanic depth. Filled with poems about American cities, air travel, and aging, this collection deftly chronicles John Updike’s continued journey as an American author.
Wearing literary glasses of gleaming clarity, Updike views the world through an introspective microscope, noting occurrences both awe-inspiring and mundane. Without altering his own sophisticated style, Updike pays homage to Whitman and Kerouac with poems titled “On the Road” and “Song of Myself,” and perpetuates an American wiry-bearded beat theme by gracing the back cover of Americana with a photo by Allen Ginsberg. Updike then continues his patriotic ode by writing numerous poems about American towns.
In “Phoenix” Updike describes the Arizonan city both brutally and beautifully:
This wealth of Taco Bells and high rise glass
will drink the Salt and Gila rivers dry
to form a golf-course universe, a garden
of imaginary blooms, a made mirage
whose web of jogging paths entraps a swarm
of retirees all struggling not to die.
Sleep is a strange city. Even
the terror there, the embarrassments –
being naked in a supermarket, and smeared with shit –
have a healing, purgative effect.
When they lift, we are grateful
for reality, terminal though it be.
…[Bech] felt the warmth of her skull an inch from his avid nose; he inhaled her scalp’s powdery scent. Into the dear soft warm crumpled configuration of her ear he whispered, ‘Say hi.”
“Hi!” Golda pronounced with a bright distinctness instantly amplified into the depths of the beautiful, infinite hall. Then she lifted her right hand, where all could see, and made the gentle clasping and unclasping motion that signifies bye-bye.
