INTRODUCING the first story of my new book of short
stories Sparkles in the Mist. “The
Genius of Updike” is a story about an aspiring writer’s dilemma. Oriano Fellici,
the narrator of the story, wanted to become a writer since high school; but he
had to suspend his calling to pursue a higher calling that took many years to
satisfy. Now he’s back and wants to reconnect with his calling to write, but he
feels it may be too late. “The Genius of Updike” is Oriano’s re-entry into the
creative process of writing, a dynamic that is played out with his friends Leo
Kubochev and Boris Petrochenko. The conflict of the story lies in their
separate philosophies of life: Leo is an agnostic, Boris an atheist, and Oriano
a believer who defies description. But what is it that Oriano believes that
both intrigues and frustrates his friends, and everyone who meets him? This is
the mystery of “The Genius of Updike” and the stories to follow…
..........................................................................................................................
The Genius of
Updike
“He makes me want to shoot my word processor,” I said
to Leo Kubochev on the way up to the city. It was raining, so I took the day
off work. I had an outside job to complete: forty sun-bleached windows to
stain. “He scares me dumb, he’s so brilliant.”
“He just raised the bar for you,” Leo, who surprised
me by buying an Updike novel in the used book store nest door to Fanny’s Fabric,
said; Roger’s Version, a novel of
love and sex and faith and God and the modern life as told by “the master of
sheer elegance of form.”
I couldn’t dispute that. Why would I want to? Envy?
How small could I possibly be?
“I regret not keeping up my reading of literature. I
spent too damn many years reading spiritual books. Now I’m so frigging far
behind I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up.”
I had just finished reading Shirley MacLaine’s The Camino when I accidentally
re-discovered John Updike in The Best
American Short Stories of the Century, which he edited and introduced. I
wanted to get back into short story writing, and the best way to do that was to
saturate myself with the works of great writers, like the master of le mote juste.
“You still can,” Leo said, his voice slightly broken
with an affected measure of consolation. “You can’t give it all up now, can
you?”
“No. I love writing. I may not have the talent to say
what I want to say the way Updike says it, but I do have something to say; and
that should say something,” I said, and chuckled self-consciously at the irony
of my situation.
“Then say it,” Leo said, oblivious to my dilemma.
I smiled, as I often do when Leo misses the point.
“Updike reminds me of the story of the artist who put away his paint brushes
when he saw his son’s painting of a pigeon. The talent that his fledgling
displayed so threatened the artist that he completely lost heart for painting.
That’s how ‘the Mozart of Literature’ makes me feel.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Updike?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t lost heart, have you?”
“No. But Updike makes me feel that way. What spares me
the black hole of the creative writer`s despair is my belief.”
“Belief?”
“Yes. I believe in myself…”
It’s all about choices. In the media a storm is
brewing about the homeless people in Canada’s largest city, Toronto “the Good” (how ironic); but what I’d really like to
know is how these people ended up on the street in the first place.
Choices and consequences. The gap is closing more and
more each day. Karma is no longer a nebulous eastern concept; it has eyes so
large, glaring, and merciless that the spiritually obtuse are finally beginning
to see that choices have consequences.
Leo took out Updike’s novel from his jacket pocket. He
had brought it with him to impress me, which happened seldom. Running Granma’s
Marathon in Duluth at the age of 57 did impress me though, being a runner
myself; but walking around St. Jude like an overgrown boy with his finisher’s
medal dangling on its red and white and blue ribbon around his neck over his
logo-emblazoned Grandma’s Marathon T-shirt for a whole week after the race so
tarnished the effort of his accomplishment that it robbed him of his virtue and
gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “Indian giver.”
“I see what you mean,” he said, flipping through the
pages to find the passage he wanted to show me. “He gives you so much that you
feel like you’re right there with him.”
“That’s Updike. He pries open the moment with metaphor
and freeze-frames life. It’s eerie. Or spooky, as Norman Mailer would say.”
Leo read the passage he wanted to read, transporting
me to that “fourth dimension of writing” that Updike miraculously accessed with
his imagery—
“Fuck!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Too damn much!”
“Oh.”
“The fucker turns my Hemingway-inspired ice-berg credo
upside down, and it depresses the hell out of me. If I didn’t have so damn much
invested, I’d park it!”
“Park what?” Leo dumbly asked.
I smiled. “What do you say we pick Boris up and go to
the Hoito for pancakes?”
“Good idea…”
Boris Petrochenko, an unkemptly bearded little civil
servant who took an early retirement at fifty-five to maximize his enjoyment of
life, being an atheist who believes this life is all we have (although it seems
to me more posturing than conviction), has one thing in common with our mutual
friend Leo; they both cling to the Randian philosophy of rational self-interest
that vainly struggles, in the conflicted manner of Camus’s blighted Sisyphus,
for more self-consciousness, but oh so vainly.
With Leo, distance running had begun to transform the
dense mass of his ponderous earth-bound ego, and with Boris the constantly
daily exposure to life’s karmic transmutations (although with people like him,
recalcitrantly) forced him to make small but discernable concessions with his
unconscious falseness, an ongoing battle with no end in sight.
But that’s nature’s way, as Mr. G used to say—the
mystic philosopher whose consciousness-transforming system shifted my center of
gravity from the false to the real in me, a distinction that Leo and Boris were
loath to make whenever logic pressed them.
“Nature only take
you so far,” said Mr. G to his inner
circle. “Then must take evolution into
own hands,” he added, in his thickly accented pidgin English. “First roses, roses; then thorns, thorns,”
he told his students when he set them out on their journey of self-discovery,
which I knew from anguishing personal experience to be nothing less than the
secret truth of what Christianity so blithely referred to as being born again
in spirit.
“I can’t say for sure because I haven’t read enough
Updike to draw any conclusions,” I said to my friend Leo on the way to the city;
“but from the stories I’ve read so far, I’d say that he’s taken up literary residence
in the despairing kingdom of finitude.”
“What does that mean?” Leo asked, with a puzzled frown.
“That’s what my impression of Updike’s stories have
rendered. Writing about the human condition makes you very conscious of life,
and Updike is painfully conscious of life, especially life in the American suburbs;
that’s what I mean. But there’s something missing. Despite his brilliance—which
is more alluring to me than having sex with a bride of Jesus—he doesn’t
penetrate the mystery that beckons most creative writers.”
“What mystery?” Leo asked, again with a confused look
on his round, Polish face.
I smiled. “Updike—not fair yet, I know; but I suspect
it from the stories I’ve read so far—dissects the human condition piece by
piece to see where the soul resides; and story after story, perhaps novel after
novel, I’ll just have to wait and see, he finds nothing but the same tired old
vanities. Man, cries John Updike, with exquisite anguish, is an obsessive
passion condemned to repeat himself. And that, mon amie, is his cursed rock.”
“Rock?” Leo, a philosophy graduate, dumbly asked.
“Dilemma,” I explained.
“Oh,” Leo said, with a blank stare. “But Updike’s just
writing about life, isn’t he?”
“Sadly, yes…”
Boris was home. Often when Leo and I drop in he’s out.
Usually at the university. He’s been taking courses—Spanish, French, and
History (not religion or philosophy, which would only threaten his belief
system) to get a working knowledge of Spanish and French because when his wife,
who is also a civil servant, retires when she turns sixty they plan to do the
pilgrimage in Spain that Shirley MacLaine made famous in The Camino but which she and Boris refused to read because they
both thought she was a kook and world class flake.
“Sounds good,” Boris said. “I’m glad you guys dropped
by.”
At the Hoito Restaurant, Boris and I ordered Finnish
pancakes (mine with sausages and Boris’s just plain) and Leo a large bowl of
porridge because it was cheaper, and within minutes we were talking politics
which often began our conversations.
“What do you say we go to a used book store? I’m
looking for some Updike books,” I said, after we had thoroughly masticated the
virtues of the new Alliance Party born whole out the right rib of the Reform
Party of Canada.
“Sure,” Leo said.
“I’ve got no classes today,” Boris said. “Sure.”
Chapters, where I usually buy my books (apart from my
two book clubs, QPB and Doubleday) didn’t have any more Updike. I had already
purchased three collections of his stories—The
Afterlife, Trust Me, and Pigeon
Feathers. I already had his novels The
Centaur and Rabbit, Run, which I remember
attempting to read in grade nine or ten but which I had put aside for
Hemingway’s beguiling less-is-more “cablese” style of writing.
Boris and Leo like to frequent Chapters (they use it
like their personal library), but in strict obedience to their more-for-less
philosophy of life they buy most of their books from used book stores, so they
knew where to go; I followed their directions.
I’m curious to know what you think of this guy,” Leo
said as we drove over to Westfort, which was always known as the rough part of
town. “He’s pretty gruff.”
Boris laughed. “He’s different, that’s for sure.”
When we walked into the book store, an old red brick
building that stubbornly resisted the march of time, it felt like walking into
the dingy past. It was crowded with wire bookshelves cloying with musty
paperbacks, the air was close, and the ceiling and walls (what we could see of
them), a dirty yellow from years of cigarette smoke, were blistered and
cracked. The whole place smelled stuck.
The used book seller sat behind his old wooden counter
leaning back on his chair, his feet propped up on the inside shelf of the
counter and a paperback in his hands. He had black thick-lensed glasses as
dense as the bottom of the old glass female-shaped Coka-Cola bottles, and he
wore a Greek sailor’s cap and had wide yellow tape-measure suspenders; and
directly above his head a piece of plaster hung loose, ready to fall like the
sword of Damocles.
He waited until he finished reading his paragraph,
then he looked up at us. “Where the hell you been hiding?” he said, recognizing
Leo.
“I’ve been around,” Leo, who informed me later that he
hadn’t seen him in seven or eight years, replied.
“Me too. Right here,” the man said, with an air of
dismissive pride.
“It looks like you haven’t gone anywhere for the past
thirty years,” I freely offered, with a mirthful chuckle.
“Twenty-nine years,” he corrected, dead pan.
“What did you do before that?” I asked.
“I worked on construction. What do you do?”
“I’m a contractor. Drywall and painting.”
“How do you price a job?” he asked.
“It depends. By the hour or by the square foot.”
“How much a square foot?”
“Taping or painting?”
“Taping.”
“Anywhere from twenty-five to thirty cents.”
“How about windows and doors?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the room dimensions.”
“But you don’t tape windows and doors.”
“It’s a working formula. If I charge by the hour it
comes out to almost the same thing.”
“How do you know how many hours to charge?”
“Experience.”
“How long you been contracting?”
“Twenty-some years.”
“You like it?”
“I like being my own boss.”
“Me too. I couldn’t work with the bricklayers any more.
Those wops treated me like I was stupid. Too thick, too thin, too dry, too wet.
The gymento was never right for them. You know what I did? I took the fucking gymento
back and did nothing to it. And when I brought it back to them they said it was
just right. Fucking dummies. They just wanted to let me know who the boss was,
that’s all.”
“So you bought this place and told them to go and fuck
themselves,” I said.
Startled, he just stared at me. “Exactly. You
Italian?”
“Canadian,” I replied.
“Italian Canadian,” he said.
“Canadian. You want to see my papers?”
“Bullshit. Curly hair, brown skin, you’re Italian.”
“Brown skin? My skin’s no browner than yours. What are
you, Polish?”
“Ukrainian.”
“I was born in Italy, but I was young when we came to
Canada. How about you?”
“I was born here.”
“No kidding?”
“No.”
“You’ve got a Slavic accent.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Just like I’ve got brown skin.”
Struck dumb again, he just stared at me with his large
Coca-Cola bottle eyes. “So how’s business?” I asked.
“Who cares. I got my pension now.”
“So you’re just putting in time?”
“I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“You just sit here and read?”
“So what?”
“Do you have any Updike?”
He stared at me again. Boris and Leo were transfixed
by our verbal sparring. But the silence extended beyond its conversational
pause, and nervousness set in.
“John Updike,” I said, breaking the tension.
“I know that,” he snapped back.
“Then what the hell took you so long to reply?”
He didn’t say anything. He got up and walked over to
an aisle of books and started thumbing through. “No Updike.”
“Any Philip Roth?” I asked, curious about another
writer who had mined his own life of its precious ore.
The bookseller dug through the Rs but found no Roth
and I asked for another seasoned miner, but he had no Saul Bellow either.
“Well you’re no
good to me,” I said, and laughed.
“Fuck off then!” he snapped back.
Leo and Boris winced. They still hadn’t caught on to the
bookseller’s cynical humor and wondered what I was going to say.
“Is this how you treat all your potential customers?”
I said.
“Why not? I don’t need you.”
“Because you get your old age pension, right?”
“You got that right.”
My friends laughed. So did I. “Life’s good now, eh?” I
said, with a snicker.
“Good enough for me.”
“Don’t you get bored here all day?”
“Sure I do. Who wouldn’t?”
“You keep a journal?”
“What for?”
“Something to do.”
“Who the fuck cares?”
“So you’re just putting in time, then?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“That’s all life means to you?”
“What else is there?”
A grey-haired lady with gold-framed glasses and a
tired purple blemish the size of a deformed baby’s hand clinging to her right
cheek like an alien insect and dressed in a matching lavender pant suit walked
into the store.
Hesitant to walk up to the counter where Leo, Boris,
and I stood the lady waited politely. No one spoke. Finally, she said, “Bill,
do you still trade books?”
“Maybe. How many you got?”
“I’ve got a shopping bag full.”
“Let’s see them.”
“You remember me, don’t you Bill? I used to come in
here all the time before I moved to British Columbia three years ago. I always
traded my books here.”
“Sure I remember you.”
The nervous lady was expecting more, but the bookseller
whose name I just learned was Bill did not amplify. “Okay, I’ll go and get
them,” the lady said.
“I guess there’s no point hanging around here,” I
said, and turned to leave. “See you in six or seven years, Bill.”
“If I’m not six feet under,” he replied.
Smiling, Boris and Leo said goodbye and followed me
out the door. We passed the lady carrying her bag full of paperbacks. Looking
at me, she said, “Bill hasn’t changed much, has he?”
“I just met the man today,” I said.
“Oh, well; that’s the way he was twenty years ago.
He’s still wearing the same hat, I see. But he’s a nice man once you get to
know him,” she said, sounding apologetic.
“A little rough around the edges,” I replied. “Have a
nice day, mam.”
“Thank you,” she replied, smiling. “You too.”
At Chapters we gravitated to different aisles and
browsed for an hour and I bought Gary Zukav’s Soul Stories and Dr. Brian Weiss’s newest installment in his
past-life regression series, Messages
from the Masters (old habits die hard), and later we went to the Scandinavian
House which Boris and Leo chose because like the Hoito it served good food
cheaper than most places, and we talked about Bill the used book seller.
But this inevitably led to a philosophical discussion
about life’s purpose. “So what’s the problem?” Boris replied to my comment that
the squandered life wasn’t worth living.
“I know it’s his choice, but he’s like a dried up old
prune just putting in time. But that’s okay. He’ll just keep coming back until
he gets it right,” I added, and laughed.
“Get what right?” Leo asked.
“Life,” I replied.
“I don’t follow you,” Leo said.
“He’s talking about reincarnation,” Boris said.
“Oh,” Leo said, popping his head up like a goffer.
“You don’t believe in reincarnation, do you?” he said, addressing Boris.
I laughed. “Leo, Boris is an atheist.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
“You didn’t go for your run today, did you?” I asked,
with a snicker.
“No. Why?”
“Consciousness, Leo. That’s what getting life right is
all about—more and more and more self-consciousness. Incidentally, John Updike
wrote a book of memoirs called Self-Consciousness.
I forgot I had it in my library until I re-discovered him.”
“Have you read it?” Leo asked.
“I read it after I finished his Afterlife stories.”
“What did you think of it?” Leo asked.
“His memoirs or his Afterlife stories?”
“His memoirs.”
“Disappointing.”
“Oh? I thought you liked Updike.”
“I do. He makes my old high school hero Hemingway read
like a verbally challenged linguist, but he doesn’t tell us much about who he
really is in his memoirs. Judging from the short stories I’ve read so far, I’d
say that the flame of Updike’s imagination consumes his every experience in his
fiction. Just as Saul Bellows son Greg said about his father, ‘If you want to
know anything about my father, read his novels.’ So I guess I’ll just have to
keep reading Updike’s fiction to see what he’s all about.”
“Really? You think he writes about himself in his
novels?” Leo asked.
“‘Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of
life,’ said Alice Munro. I’m going to see if anyone has written a biography on
Updike to find out for sure, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar that he mined his
life for all the literary gold that he could get.”
“Have you read Updike?” Leo asked Boris.
“No,” Boris replied.
“You should. He’s really good,” Leo, who had only read
the first two chapters of one Updike novel, said. I wanted to laugh, but
didn’t.
“I don’t read novels anymore,” Boris said.
“Why not?” Leo asked.
“I’ve got no time.”
“You should make time. He’s really good.”
I did laugh. “He’s right, Leo. Why read Updike to
confirm what he already knows.”
“What’s that?” Leo asked.
“Life is what you make of it. Unlike Bill the
bookseller, Boris lives his life. But, I suspect,” I added, the thought forcing
me to smile at Boris, then chuckle, “as different as you may be from crusty
Bill, I think you’ve both staked out your own cynical territory.”
“I agree. So what?” Boris said, mimicking Bill the
book seller.
I laughed.
“What?” Leo asked, again like a goffer popping his
head out of his hole.
“I can respect skepticism, Boris,” I said, ignoring
Leo’s thick and imperceptive nature; “but I can’t condone the ostrich syndrome
when I see it. You can’t pass judgment on something if you don’t know anything
about it. For example, Shirley MacLaine had past-life visions on her Camino pilgrimage
and gives us information about the androgynous inhabitants of the lost
continent of Lemuria that tax my credulity, but I can’t dismiss her experience
simply because I find it hard to believe. The only thing I can do is neither
believe nor disbelieve until I get more information.”
“It’s all moot. I don’t believe in reincarnation,”
Boris replied.
“You choose not to believe,” I corrected.
“What do you mean, choose? I don’t believe in it.”
“I’d love to see what you would say if someone like
Doctor Weiss hypnotized and regressed you to a some of your past lives,” I
said, and laughed.
“I wouldn’t let him. I don’t agree with the idea of
letting someone control my mind.”
“Is that why you don’t believe in God?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Boris asked, squinting his eyes in
a puzzled frown.
“Belief in God is probably nurture, not nature. So
you’re rebelling, is that it?”
“No. I just don’t believe in God.”
“And no soul either?”
“No soul.”
“And no afterlife?”
“No.”
“No spiritual phenomena of any kind?”
“Nope.”
“Boris, I’ve been reading the literature of the Way
for over thirty years now—” I stopped in mid-sentence. I saw the puzzled look
on his face. “Literature of the Way is any writing that has to do with man’s
spiritual quest,” I explained. “And whether you want to accept it or not, there’s
something there. History tells us that.”
“Not for me there isn’t.” he insisted.
“You just don’t believe, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you explain all those near-death experiences
that people have which Doctor Raymond
Moody has written about, and all those past-life regressions that Doctor Brian Weiss
has done and written about, and communicating with the Other Side like James
Van Praagh has done on the Larry King show?”
“I don’t know if I can explain it. All I know is that
I don’t believe in it.”
“But that’s intellectually dishonest,” I said, knowing
this would bristle Boris.
“Why?” he pounced. “Just because I don’t believe in
this stuff doesn’t make me intellectually dishonest.”
This was an old argument with us, but I couldn’t let
it go. It had taken two years for him to wander back to the topic, and I wasn’t
about to let him off so easily. “Belief is a matter of faith, Boris. But what
about experience? Suppose you had an out-of-body experience; would you explain
that as a mental phenomenon also?”
“Of course. What else would it be?”
“It would be what it is, an experience of your
essential self leaving your body We have two selves, Boris; an essential self,
and an existential self. Our essential self is the self that lives on after our
body dies. You can choose not to believe this, but you can’t dismiss all of the
anecdotal evidence that’s out there; and believe me, there’s plenty. I’ve had
experiences that fall into this category, and I know they weren’t a figment of my
imagination. You’re belief is hollow, Boris. That’s why I said that you choose
not to believe—”
“Who are you to say that my belief is hollow?” Boris
jumped on me. “You don’t know a damn thing about my life.”
Updike, the only writer I have ever read who abstracts
the essence of words like a practitioner of the mystical science of homeopathy,
popped into my mind; and, smiling, I replied: “It’s the writer’s curse, Boris.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“The mote in your own eye and all of that,” I said,
with an ironic chuckle.
Boris hated it when I laughed at his expense. “Are you
saying that I don’t know myself?”
“Ironically, yes. Just like Updike’s memoirs that he
called Self-Consciousness. It’s not
about his essential self; it’s about his psoriasis-afflicted existential self.
But the damn thing about the self is that it’s dual in nature, and making
conscious the unconscious is what life is supposed to be all about. Christ
called it making the two into one, which is what Jung’s psychology of
individuation is all about. But that, I’m afraid, scares the hell out of you.”
Livid, Boris just glared at me; and Leo, who had graduated
with an Honors BA in Philosophy but didn’t know what agnostic meant, had to
break the silence. “Why would it scare him,” he asked in a nervous voice. He
had witnessed this before, and he loved it.
“And you too, Leo,” I said, with a snicker. “It would
scare the hell out of you too, because with more consciousness comes accountability,
that’s why. The more conscious you are of your essential self, the more
accountable you have to be for your life; and I know you’re just going to love
this, Boris—because fundamentally, it’s a moral universe.”
“Bullshit!” Boris exclaimed.
“Then you’ll just keep coming back until you get it
right,” I said.
“No I won’t. And neither will you. This is the only
life there is, and you can’t prove different,” Boris insisted, and flung
himself back into his chair.
“You’re right, I can’t prove it. And would you like to
know why?”
Boris didn’t reply. He just glared at me, his little
eyes once again signaling that his primal instincts had kicked in to protect
his wounded ego, and good old Leo had to break the silence once more: “Why
can’t you prove it?”
“Because there’s only self-initiation into the
mysteries of life, that’s why. To some it
is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and to others not,
as Jesus would say; but if you choose not to believe, you can’t expect to be
initiated. It’s that simple.”
“Bullshit!” Boris snapped back again.
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “What a small world
you live in, Boris. But that’s your choice, isn’t it? Now, what about this
other used bookstore; are we going or not?”
“Sure,” Leo said. “You want to go now?”
“I’d like to see if they have any Updike.”
“They do. When I bought Roger’s Version they had half a dozen of his novels there.”
“Good. Let’s go, then,” I said. I could feel Boris’s
anger, but I knew he would get over it eventually. He had before. I left a tip
and we left. Boris and Leo didn`t believe in tipping.
Coincidentally, I knew the young man who worked at the
Book Shelf next door to Fanny’s
Fabric; a twenty-four-year-old baby giant with a friendly smile whose abusive
alcoholic father forced him to leave home at sixteen.
“Tommy!” I exclaimed, surprised to see him. “So this
is where you work?”
“Yeah. I’ve been here for three years now,” he
replied, with a big happy grin.
“And how’s it going, Tommy?”
“Good. I like it here. It’s not Chapters, but hey; it
keeps me out of trouble.”
“Good for you. I see your mom finally moved out of the
house.”
“Yeah. She’s renting aunt Carol`s apartment. She
should have move out long ago. My dad’s not too happy about it. He thinks she’s
going to go back, but she won’t.”
“I doubt it too. Bobby and Brian are happy now. Your
mom was telling me they can bring friends home to visit now.”
“Yeah. They really like it at aunt Carol`s.”
“I’m glad. Maybe they can have a normal life now.”
“Yeah. What a waste, eh? That’s why I don’t booze it.
I can’t afford it on what I make, anyway. But I’d never drink even if I could.
It’s stupid.”
“Good for you. So, Tommy; are you familiar with John
Updike?”
“The Witches of
Eastwick!” he burst out, as if it were a quiz show.
“Yes,” I said, smiling. I always liked Tommy, and I was happy he was doing okay. “Do you have any of his
books?”
“Sure. I’ve got a whole bunch of his novels,” he
replied, brimming with pride.
He showed me where they were and I ended up buying six
new Updikes for under twenty dollars, which sweetly validated my friends’
philosophy of thrift and elicited the comment from Leo, “You would have paid
ten times that at Chapters.”
I didn’t reply. I understood my friends’ frugality;
but something about second-handing life really bothered me. As prudent as my
friends were, they made it feel like a sin.
I couldn’t quite pin it down, but the image (reading
Updike had combusted my imagination) that appeared in my mind`s eye was that of
a powder dry tree trunk that was once fresh, green, and alive with élan vital, and I chuckled to myself at
the spiritual aridity of the parsimonious life. I looked at my two friends, and
smiled.
“And that, mes
chers amis,” I said to myself as the nagging puzzle of Updike’s art finally
fell into place for me, “is the genius of Updike— l’image juste!”
***
