Reflections on Playboy: Dear John Updike: a vivid literary image is not necessarily an interesting one

December 19, 2007

Dear John Updike: a vivid literary image is not necessarily an interesting one

I appreciate it when an artist in any medium describes appropriate self-consciousness and deliberateness about craft. It reassures me that I will be well taken care of as part of the audience. In the January 2008 “Playbill” section introducing the major items in the magazine, fiction artist John Updike says, “Short stories now seem to just end, as if the writer ran out of typewriter ink or paper or something. I have this old-fashioned notion that stories should snap shut in the last line and throw light back to the first sentence.”

These words gave me hope of enjoying an Updike short story, for a change. But it didn’t happen for me with his January contribution, “Blue Light.” All I could do was skim it—with boredom punctuated by mild disgust at the elderly protagonist’s bigotry against young people and fat people. I’m charitable enough not to accuse him of racism, although the hoity-toity symbolism of his WASP skin problem serves mostly as a vehicle for dreary identity politics. My generation of entertainers (Quentin Tarantino, Seth MacFarlane) doesn’t care anymore, and neither do I. As a Gen-X white boy living under the glorious First Amendment, I feel little compunction about dropping an N-bomb here and there for rhetorical purposes [time-sensitive link].

As for the promised end-of-the-story zinger, there’s no there there. If only Updike had been a little more old-fashioned about the art of the short story, he would have put a plot in that thing. Paradoxically, at the same time, Updike displeased me by failing to be hip enough in his manner of writing. Novelist Jamie Malanowski, for example, knows what the written English language has to do to compete with television and YouTube in the twenty-first century. One of Malanowski’s friends and associates, Rebecca Lavoie, gives his novel The Coup five stars at Amazon, yet she complains in passing that “the prose is so tight as to provide almost no exposition at all.” What she calls lack of exposition, I call appropriate pacing to tell a good written story these days.

Updike’s unforgivable hubris lies in being too cool to want to tell a story. The bitter old fart at the center of “Blue Light” is essentially dying of boredom. But anyone would, with the kind of psychedelic depression that Updike provides for the inner monologue. Lighten up, dude!

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:27 PM

December 19, 2007

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