John Updike R.I.P.

A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: John Updike. {Apart from this curly-bracketed note, the Quiz appears as it did on 12 March 2004, having originally appeared seven or eight years earlier in Another Place.} It's easy to say that he's the best living writer - much harder to say what his final place will be. You can't judge a writer till his bones are dust. Any names which might assist you unduly have been obscured.

1)
   Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis - delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose uneven spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion - privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a finger-nail must be experienced to be forgiven.

Answer

2)
   Their quarters in the Mishkenot included a kitchen. Mabel called from within it, `There's two sets of silver. One says Dairy and the other says Meat.'
   `Use one or the other,' Jack called back. `Don't mingle them.'
   `What'll happen if I do?'
   `I don't know. Try it. Maybe it'll trip the trigger and bring the Messiah.'
   `Now who's being blasphemous? Anyway, the Messiah did come.'
   `We can't all read His calling card.'
   Her only answer was the clash of silver.

Answer

3)
   Vested in my dignity, I faced the apparition that loomed beyond the border: a pyramid of crates, sacks, and barbarically trademarked boxes. USA USA USA, they said, and Kix Trix Chex Pops. The twilight in our land is brief, after the flash of green, and I could not make out the legends on the topmost boxes; there seemed to be barrels of potato chips. Of how this mountain of fetchingly packaged pap had materialized in the desolate aftouh of Èfù there appeared little trace; stretching away into the heavily subsidized depths of the Sahel, straight as a jet-trail, a beaten track testified to the passage of wheeled vehicles, none of which was visible. Nor was there any sign of human activity around the prefabricated fort that stood opposite to our outpost within the symmetrical vacancies of our unallied nations. Only one man, a white man in a buttondown shirt and a seersucker suit, showed himself, loping our way with that diffident, confident saunter that needs for setting an awninged main street during an American summer's lunch hour, when dozens of small businessmen, toothpicks between their lips, stroll, eye the competition, and glad-hand one another. This toubab had the tact, however, not to offer me his hand; days in the desert had wilted somewhat his certainty of being found lovable. His French was so haltingly and growlingly pronounced I switched our conversation into English.

Answer

4)
   Good Coal came in to her, scenting her sorrow. His lustrous long body, glittering in its loose sack of dogskin, loped across the oval rug of braided rags and heaved without effort up onto her swaying bed. He licked her face in worry, and her hands, and nuzzled where for comfort she had loosened the waist of her dirt-hardened Levi's. She tugged up her blouse to expose more of her milk-white belly and he found the supplementary pap there, a hand's-breadth from her navel, a small pink rubbery bud that had appeared a few years ago and that Doc Pat had assured her was not cancerous. He had offered to remove it but she was frightened of the knife. The pap had no feeling, but the flesh around it tingled while Coal nuzzled and lapped as at a teat. The dog's body radiated warmth and a faint perfume of carrion. Earth has in her all these shades of decay and excrement and Mabel found them not offensive but in their way handsome, decomposition's deep-woven plaid.

Answer

5)
   They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut pale buds. `I better go first,' Jack says. `Till you calm down.' His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn't care about anything except getting out of this mess. He wishes it would rain. In avoiding looking at Collins he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the east. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Jack thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes this hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. `That's it!' he cries and, turning to Collins with a smile of aggrandisement, repeats, `That's it.'

Answer

6)
   In a remote hollow whitened by the strengthened moonlight, Tom dumped down his burden; in his coma Bill groaned, even this groan conveying, uncannily, the man's personal accent, the half-humorous paternal dignity with which he masked his enforcer's bite. Tom gently twisted the ponderous, dignified skull, using the mass of gray hair as a handle, so the bulge of Bill's jugular vein cast a shadow in the moonlight, in the soft place behind the jaw, under the crescent of shadow cast by the earlobe. Beneath the vein, Tom knew, crept its brighter, redder brother, the carotid artery. Removing his single-edge razor, the faithful Gem, from the pocket inside his shorts where it slept, just under his belt, he slit, as deep as the blade would go, the bulge horizontally, and then, since the flow of blood, though great, was not as great as he had pictured, he added a vertical stroke above it, not realizing until afterwards that he had signed his crime with a T.

Answer

7)
   Seeing the collision coming, Walter expected it to happen in slow motion, like on television, but instead it happened comically fast, like two dogs tangling and then thinking better of it. The Royale's motor dies. Through the windshield's granular fracture Gabriel's face looks distorted, twisted by tears, twisted small. Walter feels a wooden sort of choked hilarity rising within him as he contemplates the damage. Pieces of glass finer than pebbles, bright grit, on the asphalt. Shadows on the broad skins of metal where shadows were not designed to be. The boy's short haircut looking like a round brush as he bends his face to the wheel sobbing. The whisper of Sunday traffic continuing from the other side of the building. These strange awkward blobs of joy bobbing in Walter's chest. Oh what a feeling.

Answer

8(Names unchanged)
   "Would you like to join us, Professor Clayton - is that terribly forward?" Jennifer's mother asked, two questions in one, rather breathlessly. It flashed upon me that she thought I had slept with her daughter and was slyly granting me a kind of honorary son-in-law status. How could she have gotten this idea? Only from Jennifer's sulky, embarrassed manner now, unless the girl was an outright liar, as even normal girls often are. They lie, they shoplift, they attempt suicide, all as part of their sexual development. I pictured my lonely room, my phone poised to shrill into life with the details of two unhappy women's lives, and figured that fifteen minutes of parent-child-teacher socialization could do no harm, and might do Wayward College, which was always looking to widen its support base, some good. Also, there was about Mrs Arthrop an elusive likeable something - a bit of blankness, like an unmarked price tag, that signifies a woman who will sleep with you. Or is it that you want to sleep with them? The one becomes the other, in the shadowland where sexual politics defies the best attempts of legislators to clean up corruption and graft.

Answer

9(Names unchanged)
   Freddy told them, `People come to me all the time with teeth past saving, with abscesses they've been telling themselves are neuralgia. The pain has clearly been terrific. They've been going around with it for months, unable to chew or even close their jaws, because subconsciously they don't want to lose a tooth. Losing a tooth means death to people; it's a classic castration symbol. They'd rather have a prick that hurts than no prick at all. They're scared to death of me because I might tell the truth. When they get their dentures, I tell 'em it looks better than ever, and they fall all over me believing it. It's horseshit. You never get your own smile back when you lose your teeth. Imagine the horseshit a doctor handling cancer has to hand out. Jesus, the year I was in med school, I saw skeletons talking about getting better. I saw women without faces putting their hair up in curlers. The funny fact is, you don't get better, and nobody gives a cruddy crap in hell. You're born to get laid and die, and the sooner the better. Carol, you're right about that nifty machine we begin with; the trouble is, it runs only one way. Downhill.'

Answer

10(Name unchanged)
   Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds. His torso is ripped by a terrific pain, elbow to elbow. He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and falls unconscious to the dirt. Tiger catches the ball on its fall through the basket and feels a body bump against him as if in purposeful foul. Then he sees the big old white man, looking choked and kind of sleepy in the face, collapse soundlessly, like a rag doll being dropped. Tiger stands amazed above the fallen body - the plaid Bermuda shorts, the brand-new walking Nikes, the blue golf shirt with a logo of intertwined Vs. Adhesive dust of fine clay clings to one cheek of the unconscious flushed face like a shadow, like half of a clown's mask of paint. Shocked numb, the boy repeats, "Pure horseshit."

Answer

1)
The Centaur, 1963. A fine, only slightly over-ambitious book, full of splendid passages. Vladimir Nabokov admired it, too, and he wasn't a bad judge.


Back to Question 1

2)
The Holy Land, one of the pieces in Bech is Back, 1982. The Bech collections are brilliantly funny, and throw an amazing light on the literary life of the United States. English writers, fortunately, have Social Security instead of the State Department.


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3)
The Coup, 1978. Perhaps Updike's finest technical achievement, as rich as a Christmas cake. The pile of food aid is to become the toubab's funeral pyre.


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4)
The Witches of Eastwick, 1984. There's a story - which ought to be true - that Updike happened to walk past a cinema where the movie of this was showing. Remembering that he had written a book with the same title, he went in to check. After half an hour he emerged, satisfied that it had nothing at all to do with his novel. He must have seen the last reel rather than the first.


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5)
Rabbit, Run, 1960. The epiphany which is the perfect golf shot, a unique joy reserved for the duffer. I still can't quite believe that Harry Angstrom is dead. If Sherlock Holmes could emerge from the Reichenbach Falls, surely a miracle - a heart transplant, perhaps - can save Rabbit and bring him back for a fifth instalment. [But it was not to be .... ]


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6)
Brazil, 1994. While not so good as The Coup, this is another audacious technical feat. As everyone knows, Updike wrote this novel despite having only spent half an hour in Brazil changing 'planes. I don't think the "magic" section really comes off, but overall it is a fine book.


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7)
Rabbit is Rich, 1981. The finale of a fine tragi-comic incident in the funniest of the Rabbit quartet - Nelson has just wrecked two of the three convertibles he has bought on behalf of Springer Motors. There are dangers in working for your old man. Be warned.


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8)
Memories of the Ford Administration, 1992. Perhaps we learn a little more than we need to know about President Buchanan in this rather meandering novel. It's a second-rate book by Updike's standards - first-rate by anyone else's.


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9)
Couples, 1968. An excellent novel, almost invisible in Updike's splendid backlist. It moves with hypnotic inevitability to its finely understated ending. Perhaps the best of his "conventional" single novels. [Addendum. I still had about twenty teeth in my head when I composed this Quiz. I don't think I'd have included this extract if I'd done it today .... Homo edentatus.]


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10)
Rabbit at Rest, 1990. For those who have come this far, an easy one to end with. I haven't had enough of Harry Angstrom, and I refuse to believe that Updike doesn't feel the same. Get your breath back, Maestro, and then let us have Rabbit Runs Again. [Addendum. Well, we have Rabbit Remembered, now, which is something. But Rabbit definitely moulders in the grave. Perhaps you could have him cloned, Mr Updike?]

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Last Updated: 30 January 2009