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John Updike, at 30, is among the youngest, most gifted, and most solidly established of the new novelists. His career so far has been the kind young men dream about; six of his books, including two well-received novels (The Poorhouse Fair, and Rabbit, Run) have been published. A third novel, The Centaur, will be issued later this month; it is a complex attempt to combine as parallel themes reminiscence of small-town boyhood with Greek mythology. There is almost no critic who has not praised Updike's crystalline style, his mastery of the distilled phrase. Yet amid the praise there is a growing impatience. Novelist Stacton, who admires Updike's "sense of words," summed it up recently: "I wish he could find something important to say."
Most of what Updike has said so far, important or not, has remained well within the neutral middle range of emotion and event. His heroes, particularly those of his short stories, tend to be young boys or young husbands whose problems are small, and whose perceptions, although perfect and sometimes intense, are small also. The sole (and partial) exception is his novel of Everyslob, Rabbit, Run. Here his hero is a former high school basketball star whose memories of past glory give him immortal longings. When his life runs aground in the shallows of marriage, he is moved in anguish to ask: "Is this all there is?" It might also be asked of Updike, for he leaves the question unanswered, and the book ends seemingly with author as well as hero lost in uncertainty.
Except for Rabbit, Run Updike has risked little. The risk of sloppy writing—one taken by most great novelists from Dostoevsky to Faulkner—is unthinkable to him; a page of prose, he feels, should be able to stand alone. "I would not attempt a big novel yet," he says. "My experience is too limited; I would be out of my depth." Such modesty is unexceptionable; yet it is hard to escape the feeling that out of his depth is exactly the place for a young novelist to be.
When Updike took his family to Europe this fall, he sailed tourist class. On the same ship, traveling first class, was Novelist Katherine Anne Porter. The two writers, Updike reports, did not meet. It seems long past time for this talented and valuable writer to look a venturesome novel and Katherine Anne Porter straight in the eye.
Philip Roth, who is Updike's age, is to some extent his opposite. At 26, he won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of skillful satires of Jewish life in the U.S., about which the principal reservation of critics was that it would be hard for the author ever to write anything as good. Roth accepted the award with a witty speech about the nonsensical questions writers are asked (Should the writer smoke marijuana or shouldn't he? Is Yaddo* bad for you? Should he have a telephone?). The tone of the speech was not that of a young tiger intent on astonishing his elders but of an accepted member of the literary world whose high position is beyond the need of proof.