Updike mines familiar ground for new delights

It is tempting to try to look at John Updike’s newest novel, “Villages,” in a fresh light, as if I had not also glimpsed the down-at-the-heels southern Pennsylvania towns from which the author came; had not also lived among Pennsylvania Dutch whose slow, stolid speech reverberates in his works; had not also nervously ventured, a year behind the writer, to the austere college the Puritans founded on the banks of the Charles and read his perfect comic verses in the college humor magazine; had not, with other Harvard undergraduates all way past any jealousy, acknowledged his talent; had not read “Rabbit, Run” with the shock of recognition.

Could Updike still surprise, delight and instruct? For his worlds -- presented so regularly in his 20 previous novels, voluminous short stories, essays, children’s books and memoirs -- have become a part of the way literary America sees its country. He is a point of reference and can be no more encountered with fresh surprise than a Haydn sonata.

In “Villages,” Updike dips once more into the past, once more trying to puzzle out how a boy so utterly open to indelible sensory impressions becomes the man who vividly recalls them as he makes his awkward way through life. The title refers to places but is also a metaphor for the groups of people we live among and who help teach us, however imperfectly, where and who we are.

This time the boy/man is Owen Mackenzie, born like Updike and Rabbit Angstrom in a southeastern Pennsylvania village called Willow, educated not at Harvard but at MIT. Owen applies himself to his perceptions of number and connections and forms. In another village, Middle Falls, Conn., Owen founds with a bright and pudgy partner an early and successful software company.

Updike works hard to understand and convey this newest industrial revolution, and in large part he succeeds. Owen finds that “his only-child capacity of self-amusement, his patience for solving problems he set for himself ... stood him in good stead in the burgeoning computer industry, but even on the social level he is not quite inept. His manner is shy but seductive.”

Seduce he does. From his childhood, Owen noticed girls, no, saw them, in all their intimate particularity, as Updike’s boys and men always have. Here is girlish Ginger: “On the playground swing she would kick out and soar; the swing chains would snap and tug and shake the pipe frame, pulling her back and falling as she reached horizontal; still she kicked higher, her brown legs stiff.”

At MIT, Owen courts a Cambridge princess, Phyllis, the daughter of bookish intellectuals, for a long unfulfilled time. Their clumsy wedding night, full of edgy talk, is sad.

But Middle Falls, the village in which his four children grow, affords Owen the complaisant women he chooses to complement faithful Phyllis. Unable to articulate precisely why, he seeks out their curves and softness. After a string of them, Owen seems to grow tired; then he meets Julia, the wife of the Episcopal minister.

In short order they divorce their spouses and marry. He retires, quite well off, and they move to Haskells Crossing, a village on the seacoast of eastern Massachusetts.

Now they have been there for 25 years. Owen is 71, Julia 65. The narrator remarks that when Owen first met Julia’s Episcopal husband, “Owen liked him; he liked most clergy, for holding off the unthinkable while we dally through life.” Owen thinks about the unthinkable, especially “at three in the morning when our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship.” As a child, Owen observed that “death could pounce in the middle of the night,” and it does.

Owen considers science and contemplates faith; neither offers him a sure route of escape from that ship. Rather, he finds, the order imposed on the surface of our lives “makes possible human combinations and moments of tender regard.”

“It is a mad thing, to be alive,” he says. “Villages exist to moderate this madness, to hide it from the children, to bottle it for private use, to smooth its imperatives into habits, to protect us from the darkness without and the darkness within.”

As epigraph for “Villages,” Updike chooses these assertive, humanistic, pessimistic lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world,

which seems

To lie before us like a land of

dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love,

nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor

help for pain....

It’s as if Updike is saying that is all there is, and yet, it is not so little, is it?

Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.