Must we still pretend to like John Updike?

For the moment, I’m going to pretend I’ve never read an entire novel by John Updike and judge his literary legacy on the basis of one paragraph singled out as representative of the awfulness of his prose.  The passage, we are told, typifies his habit “vacillat[ing] from the tedious to the atrocious,” scoring “somewhere between Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin on the soporific scale,” and reads thus:

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the banking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion.

There’s much Updike wrote I won’t defend—Toward the End of Time deserved the slagging it received—but for Young Master Shapiro to choose, from a hefty body of work, the opening paragraph of Rabbit Redux to bury Updike beneath should stand as the object lesson in why movement conservatives whose tastes range from Forsythe to Uris ought not be writing about literature.  I’m loath to even defend it, as it needs no defense, but here goes:

Sentence #1:

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Heavy alliteration on the “p” plays to the plodding of the pale people who emerge from the printing plant.  The sentence turns on a dime, dropping the alliteration and transforming the men into “ghosts for an instant.” That instant lasts the space of the following comma—the blink—and the blinking strips them of their ghostliness.  Needless to say, “ghostliness” describes a thing one is, not a quality one has, but Updike’s inverting the effect here—the men appear ghostly to each other as their eyes adjust to the light, but Updike would have us believe they become ghostly, only to rematerialize as daylight strips the indoor light from their bodies. 

Sentence #2:

In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the banking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion.

More inversion: Updike opens with the dark wintry mood in a clause that hangs above everything after the semi-colon the way the mountain “hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer.” The sentence then shifts into a higher gear.  We know Updike can set off dependent clauses with a comma—he did it with “in winter”—so when he lets “but now in summer” fly, we feel the acceleration as he speeds through those conjunctive clauses right into a “frozen explosion.” Not that I want to sound like a student—“the way the author uses diction”—but look at the way the author uses diction here: the stolidity of the “granite curbs” is undermined by mica starring it; the aspirations of the small porches dashed by a pervasive grayness; &c.  Only, not &c., if you follow Shapiro’s logic

I am sorry, but reading books is what I do, and I have read literaly [sic] thousands of them. That first paragraph of Updike’s on this post is absolute garbage. It is unbelievably pretentious, it is riddled with ridiculous adjectives, and it is as though he is a bad poet trying to sound avant garde and choosing words indiscriminately out of a Thesaurus.

The misspelling, comma-splicing, German-nouning man could not be anymore wrong.  There may be one too many words up there, but I doubt they came from a thesaurus.  (Because believe you me, I know from thesaurus.)

(x-posted.)

Comments

[slavdude]

Comma splice? Where? It looks like proper parallelism to me.

[Fritz]

Right now there are about 1000 posts on DailyKos that seek to show that because Bush's administration met 14 criteria the U.S. is a fascistic regime. If Movement Conservatives should think twice before writing about literature, there are plenty of Progressives (influential, natch) who probably shouldn't broadcast their notions regarding politics.

[SEK]

Fritz, I hope you're not expecting me to defend the idiocies of my over-enthusiastic fellow travelers---because I'd no more defend their stupidity than I'd tar you for something Limbaugh said. Neither party has a monopoly on stupidty. That said, I can't pass up the opportunity to slag the "SHAKESPEARE RULEZ!" crowd for failing to recognize the literariness of Updike's voice. (I'm not really a fan of Updike, but I'll admit that his un-reflective misogynistic sentences slumped onto the page in what no one who values literature would call anything less than their Sunday best.)

[SEK]

Also, it's not a stretch to call the past eight years an aberration in jurisprudence. Yes, there were extraordinarily extreme circumstances; but that doesn't mean that we should chuck baby, bath-water, bassinet, other kids and wife overboard. The Kos Kids might be overreacting, but they're overreacting to an extraordinary judicial overreach. For all our sakes, I hope that the courts re-embrace due process; for all our sakes, I hope that habeas corpus is un-suspended (if only so former Gitmo prosecutors don't have to go on television and slander our reputation in the world community by revealing how amateurish our translations of Arabic were, or how outlandish our evidence against Gitmo detainees is).

I mean, that whole crisis-coming-to-a-head with Russia over an eighth of our bloated, non-functional missile defense shield being in Poland? The fact that Obama listened to military brass (instead of techno-optimists) and decided that an actual conflict with Russia over a potentially non-functioning defense shield was the best of all options is evidence enough for me that, cynicism aside, we're about to experience some change-for-the-better. Because if you ask me, I'd rather my students look at my funny when I tell them about a third grader's feelings about nuclear war drills . . .

[Fritz]

My grandfather, RIP, had a cousin who spent WWII in a POW camp in Tennessee. I'll have to find out whether he had the right to challenge his detention in civilian courts. Of course, he (the cousin) was a lawful combatant. I think that a lot of the Kossack's confusion comes from the fact that they really don't know too much about the law and lack the ability, or desire, to distinguish between civilian and military contexts. Either they're exaggerating the actions of the Bush Administration or their obscenely downplaying the horrors of even your garden variety police state.

You might want to read Ex Parte Milligan, Korematsu v. U.S., and Ex Parte Quirin. Sure, habeas corpus has been suspended, quite rightly too.

[Rich Puchalsky]

It figures that the Bush dead-ender would invoke Godwin.

[Fritz]

Rich,

I'm sorry, maybe I'm a bit dense, but I'm having trouble figuring out what David Brent's boss, an altogether fictional character by the way, has to do with the application of habeas corpus?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Maybe you're a bit dense.

[Fritz]

It's been alleged before.