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Villages
by John Updike Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Care John
Updike’s unique voice returns in his latest novel, Villages.
In this offering, readers enter the life of Owen Mackenzie, currently of Haskells Crossing, and learn of his slow sexual coming of
age, a first marriage that led him to other partners, his pioneering work
with computers, and the richness of his retirement in this village community
and in the arms of his second wife, Julia. I thought back to reading Couples thirty
years ago, and appreciated how the richness of Updike’s writing has matured
with the writer. In Villages,
Updike’s character development is robust, his
understanding of the depth of feelings in youth and old age shines, and the
creation of the village provides at once a backdrop and a metaphor for the
whole story. Here’s an
excerpt from the beginning of Chapter iii, “The Husband,” pp. 34-39: When
Owen awakes and discovers that Julia is out of bed, he goes forth in search
of her, the two of them enacting semi-comic routines in which they
consciously—as if this will placate its advance—flirt with senility. “Where
are you, sweetness?” he calls. “Here,
darling,” she answers,
from some far-off room; but the deteriorating quality of his hearing is such
that he cannot tell if she is upstairs or downstairs. “Where’s
here?” he shouts, growing irritated. Her
hearing too is not what it had
once been, nor her need to respond to him. She falls silent, like a car radio
in a tunnel. What a child she still is, he thinks to himself, to
believe that “here” explained everything, as if she is the center of the
universe. How amazingly selfish! Still,
without being selfish she could not have given him what he so much desired at
the time they met: a new center for his life. Spotting self-love in the other
had been their point de depart. His first wife
had been relatively selfless, as if her self were something she had
absent-mindedly left in another room, like a pair of reading glasses. Julia
may have wandered outdoors, in her flip-flops. She loves the outdoors, site
of weather and of traffic. In summer she wanders into her garden, beginning
to pull weeds, in her nightie; its hem becomes
soaked with dew, her flip-flops get muddy. He has to go downstairs in his
pajamas to win a response. He even paddles out in his bare feet onto the
asphalt driveway, not hot enough to burn in the early morning. During two
decades of residence here, in this or that small emergency (a car door left
ajar and the inner lights devouring battery juice, or a newspaper carelessly
thrown into bushes as the delivery man careened around the circle in the
pre-dawn dark, or a watering hose absent-mindedly left running when they went
to bed, its sound audible in their bedroom like a murmuring heart), Owen has
trod barefoot on the macadam in a range of weathers, even in some fresh inches
of snow, and found that for a few steps almost anything could be borne, snow
and heat imparting to dulled, shoe-bound nerves an invigorating elemental
shock. He
wants to share a dream with her. He often wakes with such a desire, though
Julia long ago established a considerable lack of interest in his nocturnal
brain activity. It is important to strike in the first waking minutes, before
the dream’s delicate structure is crushed under humdrum reality’s weight. Last
night he dreamed that, standing on the lawn on the sea side of their white
house, he saw her go off, in her black BMW, on one of her innumerable errands
or escapes to Boston. He saw her car, as shiny as patent leather,
rush by and, immediately after it, his
shabby maroon Mitsubishi follow, driven not by him but by Julia again, her
pale profile preoccupied. His first wife, Phyllis, had also held her head in
this tense, eye-catching way when behind the wheel— tipped slightly back as
if in anticipation of the engine’s exploding. In
his dream he saw nothing peculiar in the duplicated Julias,
but felt something headlong and dangerous in her speed. Slow down,
darling, slow down. Now several cars were coming up the driveway,
which is too narrow for automobiles to pass. To cope with this difficulty, the
men driving the cars conducted unprecedented maneuvers—one Volkswagen Bug,
that fabled, notoriously unsafe ‘sixties vehicle of counterculture rebellion
and conspicuous thrift, backed right down off the driveway onto a grassy ramp
that Owen had never noticed before. Another vehicle pulled a clattering
trailer; he realized that these men were his weekly lawn crew. But it wasn’t
as simple as that; when he came back into the house, a family of three
Chinese, identically blobby, like inflated dolls or swollen gray ticks, were
sitting in his living room, silent but expectant. They, and the lawn crew—
morbidly tan men who smoke cigarettes while they noisily ride their mowers
around and around, missing many corners and scalping many a high
spot—appeared to assume, wrongly, that in Julia’s absence (she has gone to
Boston, in duplicate) he will know what to do, what courtesies to extend,
what orders to give. He was the owner, the host, the proprietor, the boss—a
role he has never quite grown into. Born young, he has stayed young: a
charmed life has kept him so. Nonplussed, he woke up. He
wants to describe all this to Julia, to make her laugh. He wants to discuss
with her the dream’s possible connections to real life. A few years ago,
they visited Owen
imagines Julia laughing with him as he tests these possible connections to
the imaginary Oriental visitors, who had been so self-contained, so non-nonplussably pleased in the Mackenzies’
living room, which had been reconfigured into a largely empty room with a
sloping floor. Was the slope an oneiric reference
to slant eyes, or to the slanting floor of the Scheherazade back in He
wants to share this dream especially because it was, under its
discontinuities, somehow all about Julia. His desire that she not come to
ruin in the driveway; his heart leaping in fear that she might slip on wet
leaves and fatally crash. So many of his dreams are not about her,
drawing heavily, as on the raft of the mattress they drift together through
their private universes, upon a fraught territory left behind twenty-five
years ago—the domestic contusions and commensurate griefs
in the town of Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Phyllis had played, with a
dramatically understated affect, the role of his wife. Often in his dreams
the wife-figure is ambiguous, misty-faced, and could be either woman.
Phyllis, a stately dirty-blonde, had been taller, retaining from her student
days a certain bohemian insouciance, and Julia, a compact, long-lashed
brunette, with controlled passages of frosting in her sleek coiffure, is
snappier in her dress and in her way of moving: but both acquire in his dreams
a recessive, generic wifeliness. Falls.
Fragility. If an intruding stranger or psychiatrist asked him why he loved
Julia so, Owen might have dredged up an erotic memory generated, a few years
ago, in the convalescent aftermath of her breaking her leg—one bone in her
ankle and another in her foot—while hurrying to pass him on the back stairs.
He had felt her, like a pursuing predator, breathing impatiently behind him;
then he heard the sharp monosyllable “Oh!” as she flipped into the
air, having slipped on the narrowest part of the triangular, carpeted treads
in her new, smooth-soled Belgians. She flew through the air for a second,
hurtling past him in the foreshortened manner of an angel plunging earthward
with its announcement, and then she landed on the hail carpet, lying there
motionless. He hurried to her with a thudding chest. A sudden disaster on
life’s stage: what was his role? Julia softly pronounced, while her second
husband knelt anxiously above her “I heard two breaks. Pop-pop.” This
strict accountancy in the very pit of emergency was just like her: efficient,
no-nonsense. As she lay there, showing her hushed profile, and he knelt
helpless beside her, swallowing the sudden enormity
of this domestic event, she asked, “Could you take off my sweater? Gently.”
She added, “I’m hot. I think I might faint.” “What
shall we do?” he asked her. She
was silent, as if she had fainted. In
charge by default, he told her, “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. Can
you hop, holding on to my shoulder?” They made it to the car, to the
emergency room of the local hospital, where a crude cast was fashioned, and
the next day to For
the month afterwards, they did not make love, though he demonstrated love, in
his own eyes, by bringing her meals he prepared, by learning to do the
laundry and the cooking, and by playing backgammon and watching public
television with her at night. After the month, they agreed they should try
sex again, though she would have to lie safely still beneath him, and he must
be careful of her mending bones. At Mass. General she had been prescribed not
a plaster cast but, in the latest therapeutic fashion, a plastic
boot—space-tech in feeling, overlapping blue and gray with a ridged sole curved
like a chair rocker. It could be briefly removed but had to stay on during
something as strenuous as fucking. He tried to hover above her, on his elbows
and knees, sparing her as much of his weight as he could, and to his grateful
amazement felt her rise to him, in her excitement, quicker than usual; she
ground her pubic bone against his decisively and they came together— gemlike
dragonflies coupling in air. Breathless afterwards, Julia stared up at him
from the pillow with that cloudy face of satisfied desire which puts a man,
briefly, right with the universe, all debts honored, all worries unmasked as
negligible. Pick
any sentence in Villages
and discover that the words Updike chooses are pitch
perfect. The dialogue always rings true, descriptions are complete and never
tedious, and the alternating time periods provide us with the right
exposition at the right time. There’s a gentle caring, especially between
Owen and Julia, that marks Villages
with a delicacy that lasts long after the last page is turned. Steve
Hopkins, November 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Villages.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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