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And then, at times, Updike's virtuosity leads to excess that smothers meaning and clogs the reader's senses as when he writes of "the shallow amber depths where the lemon slice like an embryo swam." That is a bowl of soup.
His descriptive splurges seem old-fashioned at a time when most writers are still either in thrall to Hemingway's ideal of verbal simplicity or overflowing with a new kind of personal, revival-meeting combustion that lies somewhere between caterwauling and glossolalia. But prose style is one of the minor differences between Updike and his contemporaries. The larger fact is that however valid his own objectives and achievements, he has ignored the mainstream of contemporary Western fiction. The French, in the roman nouveau, have reduced the novel to a random series of received sounds and images; the English are tearing apart seven centuries of established order.
The Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer—Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham—works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society—to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos—is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter. Sex in particular is the target, and the black humorists especially have been stripping away its pretensions to holiness, love mystery and galactic consequence.
Dionysian Yelps. It would be hard to exaggerate how far removed Updike is from this view of the world as lunatic comedy. He dares to hope for both the reality of God and the sanity of society, and he sees sex not as a target but as a sanctuary. Scenes that other writers would play as burlesque, Updike plays straight, no matter how absurd they are. In Couples, for example, Piet and Foxy have huddled in an upstairs bathroom during the Kennedy night party. Her breasts are milk-laden after the birth of her baby. "Nurse me!," begs Piet. Foxy consents, but moments later, Angela knocks at the door In panic, Piet leaps out of the window to the ground two floors below. The author never even winks.
This earnestness in the face of farce is of a piece with Updike's general reverence toward sex. His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.
He celebrates Janet's "nude unity of so many shades of cream and pink and lilac." But too often he mixes four-letter words with what Norman Mailer once called the "stale garlic" of his lyricism (the offense being not in the four-letter words but in the garlic). Occasionally, the garlic stands alone, as in Updike's description of a man and woman achieving climax: "So he did then travel through a palace of cloth and sliding stairways throughout the casket of perfume that