The Modesty Of John Updike

This is one of the inconveniences of shame, that it is generally inaccurate, attaches to the wrong thing.

—Stanley Cavell

Like Melville, James, and Hemingway, John Updike provokes strong opinions in people whether they have read his work or not. His many awards and his radio and television appearances have won him a visibility that is rare among serious American writers, so that journalists put him down with the same snide glee usually reserved for flashier celebrities. Ordinary readers will tell you that, although they've never read Updike, a certain self-satisfied tone in interviews rubs them the wrong way. Others, on the strength of such a phrase as suburban adultery, dismiss him as an impeccable stylist with a dirty mind. There are also the endless dust-jacket photographs of a musing, mugging Updike—in U and I Nicholson Baker remarks that Updike's mother, who in fact read and admired her son's hero, nevertheless felt that in the Poorhouse Fair portrait "he looked too pleased with himself." The consensus of this off-the-cuff Updike criticism seems to be that he's smug and vain, too impressed with his gifts, too in love with his universally admired language.

Updike himself has said, in reviewing Annie Dillard, that the "lucky few" who succeed at writing "should be quiet about it, and exaggerate neither the hardships nor the glory of their achievement." Recalling the obituary Updike wrote for Nabokov, Baker notes its "deliberately unspectacular" tone; and, without looking up the eulogy, many an Updike fan will appreciate exactly what Baker means. To his admirers one of the striking aspects of Updike's prose is its uninsistent, damped-down quality even when at its most dazzling. Call it tact or call it taste, but beneath the calculated craftsmanship lies a quiet, even lovable modesty. In the popular mind Updike is often seen as immodest—in both senses. This attitude reveals both an uneasiness with the magnitude of Updike's talent and a confusion about modesty itself. What does it mean, after all, to expect an author to be modest?

Let's begin with the insistent saw to remember where you came from—something Updike has done for over forty years in numerous stories and in such novels as Of the Farm and the Rabbit books. Again and again his familiar biographical note mentions Harvard, the Ruskin School, and "the staff of The New Yorker"; but it is to Shillington, Pennsylvania—to the house on Philadelphia Avenue, to his mother's farmhouse eleven miles away, to Reading and the whole bumpy patchwork of cropland, small town, and rough-edged city—that Updike returns in book after book. Remembering where you came from cuts both ways, of course: looking back at unpromising origins, the successful artist can imply that only a genius could have wrested a career from such flinty soil. Updike, however, revisits these places to remind himself and us of unimpressed, unassuming people who ask little from the world, who from farmer to shopkeeper to lawyer retain accents of the plainspeaking Pennsylvania Dutch. "Shillington was my here," Updike affirms in Self-Consciousness, as if by 1989 there remained any doubt.

Near the beginning of The Centaur, Updike's complex tribute to his father, the omniscient mythologizing narrator forthrightly states the teacher's defining trait: "A modest man, Caldwell was most comfortable in the underreaches of the high school." (Still earlier Caldwell's friend Al Hummel tells Caldwell his trouble is that he's "too modest.") Clowning, staging extravagant scenes, brilliantly lecturing his restless students, George Caldwell trots through the book as a clumsy unacknowledged hero, and does so to the embarrassment of his son Peter. At one point Caldwell's obituary interrupts the narrative, citing the words "the joking modesty so intrinsic to the man." As he originally did with "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town," Updike the young adult (thirty-one when The Centaur appeared) uses a shamefaced teenage point of view to portray a father's goofy antics, looking beyond them to a quiet perseverance, a reluctance to rate oneself high.

Peter Caldwell narrates his sections of...