Cynthia Ozick on John Updike:
His is not a social faith. Though ''Lifeguard'' closes with an exhortation to ''be joyful,'' the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayistic apercus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the daily vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts...Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture. Despite this busy Bruegelian amplitude, the concluding soliloquy of the unsettled young husband in ''The Astronomer,'' who is befuddled by an atheistic sophist, carries a recognizable Updikean signature: ''What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?''
But the past, so defined, is not the same as history. By a lively coincidence, the current publishing season brings us also the early fiction of Saul Bellow, where history infiltrates nearly every thought or movement -- which is perhaps why Bellow has been called our most ''European'' novelist. Among contemporary fiction writers, Updike is the most rootedly American (though of German, not WASP, stock), and the most self-consciously Protestant: the individual in singular engagement with God. The Protestant idea of God, which nurtured and shaped America (at least until Sept. 11, 2001), is the narrowed Lord of persons, not of hosts; he is not conspicuously the Lord of history.
No comments:
Post a Comment