Learned Critic, Working Stiff

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike. (Knopf, 2007. xxii + 704 pages. Illustrated. $40)

“I never miss a high-school class reunion,” writes John Updike, “and never come away without a story.” The first half of that sentence, from a note on one of his recent short stories, epitomizes Updike the small-town Pennsylvanian returning to the place he loves and can never outgrow. In the second half of the sentence, Updike changes with a wink into the resourceful writer, long since flown from Shillington to the world of art and literature. He is Rabbit Angstrom and he is Henry Bech, two “slices from opposite sides of my pie,” as he explains in an essay about recurring characters in his work.

When he writes nonfiction, Updike gets to alternate between Rabbit and Bech in a way his fiction doesn’t easily permit. His essays and criticism express the nuanced sensibility that has distinguished a long career of book reviews and art commentary, but at any moment the restless cosmopolitan intelligence can give way to the vulnerable musings of the average American. Perhaps this is because, for Updike, ideas are only half the story. His drive to render sensations in all their immediacy and availability keeps him a fervently democratic observer, ever noticing the mica chips in the sidewalk, the beat-up hassock on the living-room floor.

In Due Considerations, his ninth nonfiction collection (not counting Self-Consciousness, a volume of memoirs), Updike gathers another bulky sheaf of “odd jobs” and “picked-up pieces,” to borrow two of his other titles. By the term due consideration he means not only the respectful treatment a critic owes his or her subject, but any writing with a deadline, any writing that’s due, such as a high-school book report or a reporter’s story. Due Considerations thus provides yet another way to shoulder his double burden as learned critic and working stiff.

If this last nonfiction collection has a theme, it’s the author in old age: looking back over a crowded past, surveying a new and not always inviting present, anticipating a worrisome future. “Late Works,” one of the longer essays, brings the theories of Edward Said and Theodor Adorno to bear on the last difficult works by Shakespeare, Hawthorne, James, and others. Lighter pieces recall Updike’s long experience with cars and, what is surprising, poker. He mourns past glories in everything from Disney movies to book design. Yet, although Updike in 2000, at age sixty-eight, writes of packing his bag, and describes his desk as “ominously clean,” the hundreds of pages produced after that year tell a different story. For decades he had been writing about growing old and slowing down, all the while maintaining the same brisk pace and exacting standards. Sizing up the current scene as a critic in his seventies, he sounds bemused but never bewildered, amused but never condescending.

Nowhere is his undiminished vigor more apparent than in the sixty-two book reviews contained in Due Considerations. In the foreword to his story collection Licks of Love, Updike admits that reviewing eats away at the time he once devoted to stories, but consoles himself that, while ultimately “contingent and dispensable,” book reviews “demand a kindred spurt of energy and strive for somewhat similar harmonies and resolutions.” The reviews in the new collection amply display this craftsmanship, as Updike gathers his research, analysis, and personal experience into a whole that instructs and entertains. Conveying the atmosphere of a novel with a synopsis and a handful of quotations is comparable to showing off an opulent room through a keyhole or, at best, through Venetian blinds; but Updike tackles the job with precision and panache, no matter how abstruse the plots of storytellers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Orhan Pamuk. Only after much patient and sympathetic reading does Updike come down with a mild yet firm judgment.

Along the way he tosses off plenty of gems of his own, such as this comment on the centrality of a child character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: “The newer novelists, having inherited...