John Updike on almost everything: Brilliant, but passion isn't there

Review Essays

Due Considerations

By John Updike

Knopf / 736 pages / $32

Some writers are acquired tastes - the literary versions of anchovies and smelly cheeses. Others are staples - the bread and milk of the literary larder.

John Updike is somehow both: so prolific as to be a staple, so frequently arcane as to be an acquired taste. His latest collection of essays and criticism, Due Considerations, is well over 700 pages and contains literary musings on everything but the kitchen sink (although the piece on the longevity of Coco Chanel or the one on coins vs. paper money might qualify as a metaphoric kitchen sink).

One either likes Updike or one doesn't. There's no, "Um, Updike - I'm just not sure" equivocating about the author of a gazillion stories, poems and non-fiction pieces and half a gazillion books. Updike's literary crest is synonymous with a certain style of 20th century, post-World War II, neo-suburban writing. He is Rabbit, he is Bech and he is also the heir apparent to Mencken and as such is often supercilious, frequently precious and occasionally brilliant. Which makes him daunting for reviewers. How to critique the erstwhile critic? Go at it, man! There's a little something for everyone in Due Considerations, which is "merely" a collection of the past eight years of Updike's work - ah, prolificity! A little something for everyone who is a man, a white man, a straight man and a man over the age of 50, preferably. If one is younger, female, gay or of color, well - not so much for you.

This may seem a quotidian and even querulous complaint about one of America's most lauded and industrious writers, but there it is. If one wants to go back in literary time, Updike's way-back machine awaits. Forgotten Edmund Wilson, have you? The poems of Karl Shapiro? Never heard of Wright Morris? Well - Updike will refresh or restore your memory. Twain and Hemingway, Thoreau and Hawthorne, Thornton Wilder and Max Beerbohm - yes! But should you want some insights in women writers who are not Pearl Buck or Eudora Welty (not that they are not magnificent, of course), or writers of color who are not Asian, you might look elsewhere. And Updike really does not get gay people. As he notes in a critique of the British gay writer and Booker Prize winner Allan Hollinghurst, "After a while you begin to long for the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character." Well, actually, not if you are a gay man, you don't. But well put, well put.