On Updike's style

The knock against John Updike has always been that he devotes far too much of his work to extended, sometimes mannered, descriptions of time and place that do little or nothing to advance the plot or develop character and theme - a little extra thrown in for the carriage trade, as one unkind reviewer once wrote. There no denying that Updike at times seems to be in love with his own style and with his ability to "summon up remembrance." Proust is his cousin - though not his sibling, as even Proust uses his set pieces as a way to examine the very nature of memory and perception. That said, in Updike's best and most mature work the descriptions are integrated into character and plot, notably the last two volumes of the Rabbit series and in his late-life recollections, which seem almost like memoir, of his childhood home in Pennsylvania. The Centaur (1963) is not one of his "mature" novels, and it's obvious that a ruthless editor could trim this slim novel down to a short story; there are numerous descriptive passages - first snowfall of the season, car stuck in snow, views from hotel window of downtown Alton at night, sites and sounds of a high-school basketball game - that could be cut. Could, but should not be: These passages are Updike's first attempt to collect his memories and to create a mood and sense of place, and sometimes to give us a moment of insight that's closer to lyric poetry than to literary fiction. The Centaur is by no means his best novel - and the guiding metaphor of the network of references to Greek mythology seems over-thought and inconsequential, though it probably earned him is first National Book Award, as the judges made up for overlooking Rabbit, Run (you want something more serious and literary? here it is!). But the very things that could be cut are the passages that today make reading this novel pleasurable and worth while; he hadn't yet figured out how best to use his many talents and his weirdly prodigious memory and "negative capability," but what we see in The Centaur is the early promise of a great writer near the start of his career. If JU were a young writer today, would he be tempted toward the now quite popular "auto-fiction"? Possibly, though by writing literary fiction he gave himself the opportunity to revisit the same territory repeatedly, each time w/ a slightly different angle of approach and launch.