THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412210206
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
There is life after youth.
John Updike offers this not insubstantial consolation to the middle-aging in his sharply perceived, lyrically written new volume of upscale suburban activity, The Afterlife and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 316 pp., $24).
``The Big Guy is getting our range,'' intones one of the author's incisive New Englanders about death, and it is useful to note that Updike, nearing 65, is himself homing in on Social Security. He, like his subjects, has observed the depressing presence of contemporaries in newspaper obituaries. And he, like his subjects, has complained with geriatric pique of a general obliviousness of juniors to traditional civility and form.
Lord knows there are those of us among his readers who can identify with Fogel, Updike's W.C. Fieldsian grump, who finds himself beset by reality's little irritations in ``Short Easter.'' Have we not also driven law-abidingly down sundry expressways of our own, only to be passed on the right by some pert upstart in a sports car? And have we not also grunted with satisfaction at the impending presence there of a blinking yellow arrow?
Fogel pressed on the accelerator, to keep abreast of the boy and hold him out in the doomed lane. Fogel smiled behind the wheel, picturing the other car's satisfying crash into the great arrow - the raucous grinding of metal, the misty explosion of glass, and himself sailing serenely on in his middle lane. But the boy, getting the picture, cut in so sharply that Fogel had to brake or hit him; he chose to hit the brakes, and the youthful driver, steering one-handed, held up the middle finger of the other hand for Fogel to see as the red car, belching, pulled away.
Yes, we can recognize this turf.
Updike catalogs an increasingly familiar emotional landscape: physical failure; familial diminution; upward immobility. Sudden shifts among one's peers - divorce, remarriage, re-remarriage.
No wonder Fogel, beset by untidy, insensitive, interfering humanity at the grocery store, the post office, the bank, dreams wistfully of equipping his Mercedes with a button that would summarily annihilate other vehicles.
But the Fogel who seems at first almost comic ends quite otherwise, curled in a fetal ball on the bed of his long-departed offspring, sans all joy, purpose and meaning, contemplating life as ``a Sisyphean matter of recycling.''
And just as Updike is incapable of making a mere cartoon of a character, so he is also intent on revealing vivid alternatives to despair. Life's not loss only. Remember W.B. Yeats' ``Sailing to Byzantium''?
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A battered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
It's Updike's theme: renewal.
Thus thrifty Fred Emmet of ``Brother Grasshopper'' comes to realize the seeming prodigality of his lifelong associate was rather a conservation of hope. And Geoffrey Parrish of ``Conjunction,'' witnessing the separation of stars, perceives a culminating distance between himself and his wife of many years. While Richard Maple of ``Grandparenting'' achieves a sense of his own vulnerability as he holds for the first time his oldest daughter's moist newborn son.
Updike's virtuosity is itself the best evidence for optimism. Has anyone ever gotten so much out of a routine teeth-cleaning as the author does in the allusive ``Tristan and Iseult''?
The last word seems to belong to Carter Billings, who with his wife visits friends in England almost as an afterthought, in the title story. The journey takes on the proportions of a spiritual revelation. Billings, a lawyer ``going through the motions,'' comes back almost literally from the dead:
The world to which he had awoken, from the English details of the orange-juice-less, marmalade-laden breakfast set before him to the muddy green windswept landscape framed in the thick-sashed and playfully various windows, reminded him of children's books he had read over fifty years ago, and had the charm of the timeless.
Updike's book of oldsters offers up nothing less than the shared sense of survival, powerful evidence of a schooled capacity to feel. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by JOHN UPDIKE and CHIP KIDD
by CNB