Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories by David Crowe (review)

back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey. In fact, Grabar writes almost exclusively about Schuyler’s scorn for both back-to-Africa campaigns and schemes to establish black homelands in the United States. One wonders what Schuyler thought, or would think, of the forms of economic separatism advanced by Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, the playwright August Wilson, and others. Hopefully Grabar will use her research on Schuyler in a thorough study of African American separatism. Ted Hendricks Towson University Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories. By David Crowe. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-88146502 -0. Pp. 352. $35.00. This much is certain: David Crowe’s Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories has installed itself as the definitive Kierkegaardian reading of Updike’s Maples stories for decades to come. Crowe’s 340-page study includes everything that a critical work with its focus demands: he offers a first-rate introduction to Kierkegaard’s theology; a comprehensive and nuanced survey of Updike’s published essays on and introductions to Kierkegaard; and a careful, insightful reading of the 18 Maples stories. To establish Kierkegaard’s relevance to Updike’s work, Crowe needs only to cite Updike’s characterization of it: ‘‘for a time, I thought of all my fictions as illustrations of Kierkegaard’’ (21). There are hints in Crowe’s text that his project initially involved illuminating more of Updike’s work than only the Maples stories in the context of Kierkegaard’s theology , that this study began as the opening of a larger critical undertaking which might have included the Rabbit novels, but it is clear that, as he warmed to his task, Crowe became convinced that these stories provided all he needed in order to critically document the relevance of Kierkegaard’s ‘‘existential scheme to live by’’ for Updike’s collection and to the author’s life as well. The scheme that this ‘‘crisis theologian’’ elucidated as the necessary human course of the seeker after meaning is probably familiar to many readers. The first stage is the aesthetic, in which the individual finds existential meaning through self-gratification. ‘‘People in this least self-aware stage,’’ Crowe explains, ‘‘first depend on pleasure-seeking and interpersonal gaming to give their lives meaning. They do so because the experience of physical and psychological pleasures keeps at bay the great existential questions about eternity’’ (9). When those questions prove to be unresolved by narcissism and the exploitation of others, some questers move on to an ethical stage, ‘‘in which seekers recognize the God-granted, universal nature of human values . . . This ethical life can be the ground for satisfying mutuality in marriage and other widely-sanctioned 352 Christianity & Literature 66(2) relationships.’’ (That concluding clause might prompt readers to wonder who the sanctioning authority is for these relationships.) The ethical stage is no termination but is only a way station, since Mere ethics do not solve the problem of death. The ethicist can only do good and then die. For Kierkegaard and Updike, all anxiety is rooted in one’s anxiety about one’s own death, not just because annihilation is frightening, but because death closes off the possibility of defining choice on one’s own behalf. It is this anxiety that leads some out of the ethical, and into a shift in consciousness that Kierkegaard and other Christians call ‘‘faith.’’ Believing that the teachings and promises of Christ solve the problems of death and purposelessness, these believers have made a leap into faith, a leap into an utterly absurd system of meaning-making which is qualitatively distinct from the busyness of living by ethics, even religious ethics. (9) If the Maples stories serve Crowe the way he intends them to, we will witness Richard and Joan Maple gradually shifting, story by story, from the aesthetic stage to the ethical stage to. . . but fictional narratives don’t always end where theological or critical schemas are very emphatically pointing, and Crowe has to concede that the collection’s final stories, ‘‘Here Come the Maples’’ and ‘‘Grandparenting,’’ depict neither Richard nor Joan carrying through the schema to the leap of faith...