… has died.
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So I walked out in the snow to pick up dinner and go to the library, and at the library I took out a couple of Updike books: Problems and Other Stories and Bech: A Book.
While waiting for my pizza I opened the short stories and found them both beautifully written and hilarious.
As always when hovering above the dim oval of porcelain, he recalls the most intense vision of beauty his forty years have granted him. It was after a lunch in New York. The luncheon had been gay, prolonged, overstimulating, vinous. Now he was in a taxi, heading up the West Side Highway. At the 57th Street turnoff, the need to urinate was a feathery subliminal thought; by the Seventies (where Riverside Drive begins to rise like an airplane), it was a real pressure; by the Nineties (Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument crumbling, Riverside Park a green cliff looming), it had become a murderous imperative. Mastering shame, the man confessed his agony to the driver, who, gradually suspending disbelief, swung off the highway at 158th Street and climbed a little cobblestone mountain and found there, evidently not for the first time, a dirty triangular garage. Mechanics, black or blackened, stared with white eyes as the strange man stumbled past them, back through the oily and junk-lined triangle to the apex: here, pinched between obscene frescoes, sat the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Or would ever see. It was a toilet bowl, a toilet bowl in its flawed whiteness, its partial wateriness, its total receptiveness: in the harmonious miracle of its infrangible and unvariable ens. The beautiful is, precisely, what you need at the time.
Or take this sentence – what a marvelous sentence – from Nevada:
The Humboldt River, which had sustained the pioneer caravans, shadowed the expressway shyly, tinting its valley with a dull green that fed dottings of cattle.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:16PM
Some more marvelous sentences, from his story "A Sense of Shelter":
"Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flaked snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s."
Updike’s imagery has always drawn me the most–he had a great way of slowing down action by calling our attention to the artistry of seemingly mundane details. This "blackboard in reverse" image has always stuck with me.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:40PM
Updike was a superb writer who managed to capture his times and pin them in his books like very few of his contemporaries. When future scholars want to learn what life was like in late 20th Century US, they would do well to start with the Rabbit books.