December 2021: Updike bio, stories by Malamud and Mann, Booker Prize winner Galgut

 Elliot’s Reading - December 2021

Adam Begley’s biography Updike reads something like 250 A+ college essays in sequence; AB gives us a concise summary and a report on the public and critical reception for each of JU’s many works (novels especially but not exclusively) almost each of which involves some discussion of how the material is drawn from and reflects on JU’s life - quite different from the Bailey Roth bio that I read recently, and for two reasons: First, JU’s life was much more private and free from the controversy and deep trauma of Roth’s; second, Bailey had access to an enormous amount of Roth material and most important he had the full cooperation of Roth and of many of his family members and friends - Roth was extremely concerned about how his life would be memorialized, whereas JU seemed to agree reluctantly to a bio but gave Begley little aside from the works and some archive material - few interviews, and even fewer interviews w/friends and family. And how could one not note the seething, beneath the surface hostility between Begley and JU’s second wife, Martha - who is not even mentioned in the acknowledgments!? Though it’s far thinner on gossip and life drama, Begley’s is still well worth reading for anyone serious about Updike’s work, in particular for the illuminations about his childhood and how that carried him through, or that he carried through, till his death. The final section, on his fatal illness (lung ca), is moving and mysterious, and throughout Begley gives his valuation of most of the works (Bailey was less judgmental about Roth). Overall, JU comes off well, as one would anticipate - thoughtful, forthcoming about his writing, reserved about his personal life. (I met Updike once, seated next to him at a post-reading dinner, and found him polite, witty, a very nice man, but guarded about everything he said to or near a reporter [me].) I would add here a bit of trivia: One of JU’s Harvard classmates and his supposed equal as an English major was Jacob Neusner, who became a rabbi and scholar and on the Brown faculty; JN was extremely prolific, more so than JU! Jacob and I were friendly when I was books ed. at the Journal, and at one point he asked if I would like to visit JU for a feature/magazine story. Of course! So Neusner wrote to or called JU, who responded to me w/ a polite no, via one of his famous postcards (I can’t believe I can’t find it!). About a year later, JU published his next novel, Memories of the Ford Administration, and one of the characters was unquestionably modeled on Neusner. The character’s name: Krieger. 

Reading and Re-reading from the RV Cassill short-story collection - so just a brief post on two of the stories that I re-read but that I wrote in more detail in previous blog entries: First, Bernard Malamud’s The Jewbird, and, as at my previous reading, this story gets a big shrug of the shoulders. Sure, there are some broadly comic lines and images as this bird lands on a NY fire escape and joins (and disrupts) family life: the bird expects to be coddled, and munches on herring pieces, and effects a Yiddish vocabulary, and in the end - takes flight. But does it mean anything? Is there any greater mystery to this metamorphosis, if that’s what it is? It’s just a “what if,” not nearly as poignant and provocative as, say, Roth’s early stories (let alone Kafka) - just a few gags that probably made the story fun to read aloud. Second, Thomas Mann’s Disorder and Early Sorrow - which remains one of the great short stories, an account at great (maybe too great) length of a middle-class German family hosting a dinner/dance party. The focus is on the grandfather, who dotes on his 8-year-old (approx) granddaughter; at end of story granddaughter has hysterical tears when she’s put to bed as she wants to be with one of the men at the party w/ whom she’d danced; grandfather recognizes that this is the first of many passions that will be part of her life - and that he’s completely excluded from her fantasies and yearnings - she’s growing away from him into a life of her own, over the course of which she will inevitably endure the sorrows foreseen in the title. Story is far too long by more standards of our era, but its antiquity is part of its charm.

And a word in praise of Colin Barrett, new to me, whose short story in last week’s ew Yorker, A Shooting in Rathreedane (an Irish village/small town), which to my mind is as good a story about a police procedure that I’ve ever seen - the story closely follows through a work day a mid-career, female police officer off to the scene of a possibly accidental shooting, upon which she finds - small-town police - that she knows the victim, a long-time ne’er do well, and his family; over the course of the story she works valiantly to keep the victim alive and takes part in the on-scene interrogation - the shooter claims to have been trying to scare off an intruder, likely true, but then again, did he have to shoot to the body? - and of course she is thinking all the time about details of her life and of those working with her - all told an excellent, tense, credible piece of short fiction. 

This is the kind of book I usually deplore, a generational story (yawn) with multiple narrative voices (choose one and carry it through!) about an ordinary, everyday family that we follow through the lives and to deaths of all but one all wrapped neatly in 250 pages or less - and that’s what the recent Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, is and the surprise is that I really liked this novel against all my prejudices and trepidations. What a great job he does in bringing this farming family in rural South Africa as over time the struggle and die off and adapt, awkwardly, to the land that is changing and evolving even as they are not. There are 5 main characters, across two generations, and Galgut artfully weaves their story and stories, moving seamlessly among the several narrative voices - he’s really the child Joyce and Faulkner, Sound and the Fury in particular - although obviously he is nearly a century later so readers today are for more adept at making their way through this sometimes circulative narration, that offers a few postmodern winks toward the end (one of the characters aspires to write a novel, though he has no literary training or skills - yet is it his novel that we are reading? how is that possible?). So, yes, it’s not the easiest book to read - it’s definitely “literary fiction” and not the debut of a movie or episodic series - but once you by in an being to clarify the populace (unhelpfully, yeah of the 3 children has a name beginning w/ A) you will, or I was anyway, be drawn into this world, a world most American readers know little of I would guess.