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A grim thought, perhaps, but Updike readily admits that, no
matter what the form, he had from an early age "set out
to be a magazine writer...and I like seeing my name in what they
used to call 'hard type.'" So in the 1990s, Updike writes
in More Matter's preface, "instead of devoting myself
wholly to the elaboration of a few final theorems and dreams
couched in the gauzy genres of make-believe," he did the
editors' bidding: he wrote essays. Quite a lot of them, actually.
Middle-brow, suburban, self-absorbed--say what you will about
Updike. One thing you can't call him: laconic. In the course
of a stunningly productive career, he's produced nineteen novels,
ten short story collections, five collections of essays (More
Matter is the fifth), five books of poetry and five books
for children--fifty books in all, including the various compilations.
And somehow, in the last decade, he's dabbled in the hard type
frequently enough to run More Matter up to nine-hundred-pages--enough
to put all overworked freelance writers to shame. Writing on
everything from Mickey Mouse to old movie palaces to photographs
of writers' desks, Updike seems intent on producing his own eclectic
encyclopedia of the twentieth century (the index alone runs to
forty pages). Or, alternatively, it could be an even more impressive
attempt to commit to paper every thought that's passed through
his mind in the last decade, give or take a few errant wanderings.
Of course, it's quality, not quantity, that matters--particularly
when it comes to essays, because the essayist must find new ways
of amusing the reader over and over again, across the course
of the book. But readers who like to say what they will about
Updike may be pleasantly surprised by this new collection. He
is, in fact, a wonderfully versatile essayist, and the best essays
reprinted here show that he's still in top form. Indeed, he's
more consistently a good essayist than he is a good novelist,
I think. (Of course, novels can be terribly large, complicated
things, and most essays--in a word--aren't. Constraints--an editor's
unyielding word count, a narrow range of assigned subjects, relentless
deadlines--focus a good essayist's mind, and the tricks of the
essay trade are more easily learned than the arcane, frighteningly
various rules that guide good novels, albeit invisibly.)
The problem with finding new ways to amuse the reader over
and over again grows exponentially when a collection contains
one hundred and eighty-five essays, as More Matter does.
But More Matter works as a whole because Updike's penchant
for writing about a breadth of subjects in which he is not expert--actively
encouraged by both Wallace Shawn and Tina Brown at The New
Yorker--lends his essays a rejuvenating freshness and variety
that makes each new section seem almost like a new book altogether.
(Ironically, it's precisely this quality that specialists find
so hard to evoke. Too often, it seems, they are so immersed in
the minutiae and the inevitable political wars that are conducted
in every field that it's hard for them to back out of the maze
and address a popular audience; their tendency is to write to
their fellow, narrowly focused professionals.)
This is an important distinction, I think. In essay after
essay, the reader of More Matter feels that Updike is
exploring and assimilating virgin material even in the process
of writing--and it's an exhilarating sensation: to feel the writer
beside you, nodding his head with you at some new, unexpected
idea. The notion's not lost on Updike, I think. In More Matter's
preface, he writes that "An invitation into print, from
however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something
beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise
have remained buried." (In the name of treasure-hunting,
Updike accepts assignments from a surprising array of sources,
suspect or otherwise; one of the essays included in More Matter,
"Bodies Beautiful," was written for the official souvenir
program for the 1992 Olympic games. Surely, he must turn somebody
down--but who? It would make a good essay topic for Updike, actually,
should he run out of topics at some point: "The Four Assignments
I've Turned Down in Fifty Years of Writing.")
This is what makes the best essays so fresh, I think--this
feeling that Updike is so actively working at these essays, not
merely to find the perfect turn of phrase but to find out what
precisely he thinks about the subject. One definition of a good
essay might be that it teaches the reader something he might
never have learned otherwise. But a definition of an even better
essay might be that it teaches the writer something he
might never have learned otherwise. And the fact that Updike
seems to learn as much from his essays as we do makes More
Matter a strong collection indeed.
But the sorts of things to be learned from this collection
seem to come in two distinct forms. On the one hand, we have
the essays in which Updike works as a professional, even academic
critic--that is, in the literary and art essays (and, to a lesser
extent, in the book reviews, though they sometimes offer considerably
less valuable insights, I think). Here, Updike gives us clear-headed,
patient criticism enlivened by a well-trained novelist's eye
for telling detail. Updike on Herman Melville, Edith Wharton,
Henry Green and (perhaps most winningly) Mickey Mouse--these
are the pieces most likely to teach us something new and substantial.
(Trust me: read Updike on Melville and you'll probably come out
with enough material to put yourself in good stead at the next
English professor's dinner party you stumble into.) And the reason
for Updike's success in these essays is obvious: the subjects
are inherently rich, and we should consider them veritable pearl
beds for a patient diver like Updike.
The second form, perhaps best labeled the ephemeral pieces
(the subjects range from suntans, haircuts and burglar alarms
to the carefree life of beachgoers in the 1960s) rely more on
Updike's skills as a stylist to make them come off. Here, Updike
seems to change personas, shifting from the professional critic
(who seems to write with one eye on his source text and the other
on his pen) to a fellow bystander pointing at something odd,
absurd or sadly gone from our own day-to-day lives. In these
essays, it's his perceptive ability, more than his breadth of
knowledge, that distinguishes him from the others on the street:
he notices more--colors, textures, a gesture that seems
suddenly obvious, once it's noticed. (This talent helps him as
an art critic too, of course.) In the end, the ephemeral essays
leave you more with a keener awareness than anything else. Let's
face it: you're not going to get far with the tweed-clad crowd
with the facts to be culled from Updike's supercilious rant on
burglar alarms. That doesn't make them bad, of course; they're
simply different altogether from the more academic pieces. At
his best, Updike approaches the ephemeral subjects with a decadent
miniaturist's attention, and the essays come across as intricate,
carefully worded confections whose verbal fecundity belie their
simple, everyday subjects. Yes, the subjects are suburban, middlebrow
and self-absorbed. But hey: they're also funny, poignant and
smartly observed.
Of course, More Matter isn't dud-free. Some of the
shorter book reviews are too brief to merit anthologizing, I
think, and a few of the ephemeral pieces are such thin exercises
that their subjects collapse under the weight of Updike's fevered
word-play. ("Print: A Dialogue," which imagines a conversation
between Bill Gates and Johannes Gutenberg, is particularly egregious.)
But the overwhelming bulk of the book--and remember: we're talking
about a book that weighs in at three pounds--is remarkably strong,
and it should stand as a testament to Updike's skills as a highly
perceptive observer as well as a multi-talented (even elastic)
writer.
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