Has the reputation of any novelist fallen quite so far and so quickly as that
of John Updike? Thirty years ago, he was at least the equal of Philip Roth
and Saul Bellow, and maybe even a good few notches above Roth. Bellow’s
matt-grey seriousness, to be fair, has also fallen quite sharply as a
commodity — whereas Roth keeps on rising with every novel, perhaps because
his best work has been written since he hit pensionable age. Updike has been
prolific of late, for sure, but his novels, for the past quarter of a
century, have been greeted by the critics with a sigh and a knowing nod of
the head: uh-oh, it’s him again.
He has a new book out, The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to, remarkably, the
only book he has ever written that made it successfully onto film, The
Witches of Eastwick, published in 1984. In a way, you can see all the
dubious stuff about Updike, the reasons for which he is these days baited or
ignored, in The Witches of Eastwick: the big, expansive, sometimes florid
prose; the careless misogyny; the all too literal commandeering of what was,
in 1984, the fashionable style, magical realism. Updike has sometimes tried
too hard to be au courant. And of course, more than anything else, the sex,
which is never very far from the navel, if not the heart, of pretty much
every Updike novel. He has always done Sex and God; once, though, Sex and
God were the things to do.
It is 40 years this month since the publication of Updike’s Couples, which has
a good claim to being the first mainstream upmarket novel that really did
sex, the first novel for the respectable middle-class mass market to have
given sex a bloody good seeing to. There had been sex before in literature,
of course, but it tended to be at the disreputable, crepuscular margins, or
in the avant-garde, or in France. Couples, published in that fractious and
febrile year of 1968, but set five years earlier, as the western world
girded its loins for the “post-pill paradise”, went further than even the
French had gone; further than Georges Bataille and Jean Genet. Further than
the once shocking Henry Miller, too. It is a good job Mervyn Griffith-Jones,
the ludicrous prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, was not
around for the publication of Couples: he would certainly not have wished
his wife or servants to read that.
It is an astonishing and beautiful book, perhaps Updike’s best — although most
would go for the Rabbit novels, those portraits of middle America that spend
a considerable amount of time outside the bedroom. Couples, though, has it
all. It is Updike’s most experimental — with long passages of stream of
consciousness, replete with rich, maybe at times too rich, imagery — yet
also his most disciplined. The story is of serial infidelity among 10 fairly
young, fairly well-to-do couples living in the fictional Massachusetts town
of Tarbox, and particularly the calamitous affair between the two
protagonists, Piet Hanema and Foxy Whitman. Their milieu — affluent,
comfortable, companionable, surreptitiously adulterous — is as beguiling and
attractive as it is corrupt. I still cannot think of a better novel from the
past 50 or 60 years, unfashionable though it might be to say as much.
The sex was, at the time, quite a surprise. Now some of it seems overwritten,
too rich: “The woman’s beauty caressed the skin of his eyes; his shaggy head
sank toward the ancient alleyway where, foul proud queen, she frothed most.”
The reaction now to this sort of thing, especially when ripped out of
context, is a cringed eeuuuew, no, please, enough; back then it was, one
supposes, liberating and evocative and truly novel.
To be fair to Updike, he lavishes as much overblown imagery on the wooden
joists that hold up the ceiling in Foxy’s house on the edge of the marsh as
he does on such things as, uh, labia. But “ancient alleyway”? I once read a
piece of criticism by Martin Amis that was ever so snidey about the
euphuistic imagery of Couples, especially the stuff about sex; but there are
passages in the book that, I reckon, contain some of the most intelligent
and perceptive and poetic prose in the English language. It is the sex that
sticks in the mind, I suppose.
The book made Updike’s name and a whole lot of money; his long Dutch nose was
to be found poking out from the cover of Time magazine. Perhaps what made
the book all the more shocking was that its author was not by any means a
radical. He was a stately, responsible, pro-Vietnam-war Democrat from
Pennsylvania, miles away from the radical chic that had gripped the American
literary and artistic establishment, and two years later would be satirised
by Tom Wolfe. Hell, he was a nice family man from a religious background,
and the philosophical ideas that infested his work — a bit of Freud here, a
bit of Paul Tillich there — were, by this fiery and disagreeable summer,
already a little passé. It was a summer of Marx and Antonio Gramsci.
Then, after Couples, the deluge, for which Updike should not be blamed.
Literature now had emptied upon it great sackloads of genitals, carrier bags
full of naughty bits. The bedroom door — and the bathroom door — had been
well and truly kicked in. Turn a page of the latest novel and there was
always some chap’s proud, thrusting manhood waiting to poke you in the eye,
or a pair of gently heaving bosoms flapping in your face.
Writing about sex in the most graphic detail suddenly became an imperative for
serious writers rather than only for pornographers. What was once merely
intimated or alluded to was now conscientiously and painstakingly spelled
out, all the noxious juices, the nipples like chapel hat pegs and the
scrotums like, like, God, I don’t know — fill in your own simile. A decade
or so later, Amis, another writer accused of casual misogyny, would, in an
early novel, concoct descriptions for female genitalia involving vole’s
stomachs and waistcoat pockets. Later he would write movingly and apparently
in earnest about the appalling “obscenification” of everyday life. No
kidding, Marty.
Couples was primarily about sex, at least, rather than being a novel to which
gasps and sighs and spurts had been added as a lucrative afterthought or as
a sop to ubiquity. Yet almost no writer has done it very well, and most have
done it atrociously. Even the best writers become undone when attempting to
shoehorn in a bit of how’s-yer-father. Certainly, even with all these
caveats , nobody has done it as well as Updike. And even the most lauded of
respectable novels packed full of shagging lose their lustre very quickly.
Who, today, could read DH Thomas’s The White Hotel without sniggering?
And don’t you wish Sebastian Faulks, in Birdsong, had simply got on with the
first world war and the fighting, rather than having his hero make a mess of
that pretty French lady’s dress?
I have read maybe four novels in the past 25 years that treated sex seriously
and survived the encounter: Platform by Michel Houellebecq; Homeboy by Seth
Morgan; Great Apes by Will Self; and, maybe, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.
This last, of course, was about the absence of sex. And Self’s book was
about monkeys having sex, which is also a bit different.
Writers somehow lose their grip when the bedroom door is opened. I am not sure
why this should be so. Sex is no less important, no less compelling, than it
was in 1968. Yet they become afflicted; some affect a mimsy prose style with
too many references to flowers — petals opening, stamens poking upwards,
that sort of thing. Others become too voluptuous and overheated, and you
have the horrible feeling they are writing with one hand only. The rest take
the easy way out and play it for laughs. Perhaps it is because writing is a
middle-class occupation and the middle class is useless at sex — but this
seems a bit of a broad generalisation, a tad unfair.
At the Literary Review, they run the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, the stated
purpose being to persuade writers to desist from writing about sex at all.
The editor, Nancy Sladek, says they should simply leave well alone: “I just
don’t think it works. It is almost always embarrassing and indecent . . .
it’s so awful.” The list of winners of this uncoveted prize begins with
Melvyn Bragg, back in 1993, for a passage that to my mind is not too bad
until you remember who it was written by, at which point you start to feel
slightly nauseous. Like reading a cookery book written by Hitler. There are
plenty of good writers on the shortlist every year — Matt Thorne and Tom
Wolfe, for example. But the winners are usually utterly meritless novels,
full stop, where the sex is hardly any more risible than the rest of the
work — Winkler, for example, by Giles Coren. Examples of past nominees can
be discreetly looked up at www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsex.html
.
There is something very British about a Bad Sex Award; then again, I am not
sure that the Literary Review hasn’t got it right. If we can’t write about
it well, why write about it at all?
One man who has appeared on almost every Bad Sex Award shortlist is, of
course, Updike. He is now 76 years old, but old age has not remotely
deflected him from the task of detailing the ins and outs of our most basic
of urges. I have the suspicion that this is how we will remember him.
Couples, though, is as beautiful a work of fiction as you will ever read. He
is not to be blamed for what followed.
