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The Examined, and Exhibited, LifeUpdike was the consummate stylist with a blogger mentality.

By Brad LeithauserUpdated Monday, June 8, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET

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And these two, from my favorite of the new stories, "The Walk with Elizanne":

Her face displayed, along with that demure quick smile he could now remember—a smile that darted in and out—a good sense of herself, an established social identity momentarily set aside, for this occasion, like a man's jacket folded into an airplane's overhead bin.

And:

Then he kissed her again, entering that warm still point around which the universe wheeled, its load of stars not yet visible, the sky still blue above the streetlights.

"The Walk With Elizanne" reintroduces David Kern—a Pennsylvania native and stand-in for the author—whose initial appearance dates back to The Same Door. We met him as a teenager; now, he's returned to Pennsylvania for his 50^th high-school reunion, an event that naturally tilts his teenage years again into the foreground. (When the narrator of the title story, "My Father's Tears," remarks, "I have never really left Pennsylvania," he might be speaking for either Kern or Updike.)

In a dark book—My Father's Tears is probably the bleakest of any of Updike's story collections; for all the gorgeous prose, death and the disabling indignities that are its forerunners are ubiquitous—"The Walk With Elizanne" strikes a welcome counter-note. It scintillates with Updike's conviction, borne out in a lifetime of devotion to the writing desk, that the amassing of sharp-eyed observation can be salvational.

At his reunion, David encounters someone he doesn't instantly recognize, a classmate named Elizanne, who, at the close of the evening, offers an unexpected and touching confession: "You were very important to me. You were the first boy who ever walked me home and—and kissed me." In the aftermath of the reunion, David undertakes a peculiar charge, which—as so often in Updike's fiction—requires a painstaking ransacking of memory. Shaped in equal parts by the "distorting lens of old age" and the riddled abiogenesis of art, David begins to reconstruct his fateful and yet nearly forgotten walk with Elizanne.

Kern's pilgrimage is ultimately directed toward a kiss—a teenage girl's first kiss—but before arriving there he must reconstruct street after street of his largely vanished hometown:

David's walk with Elizanne must have taken him from the high school or its grounds along the Pike through the blocks of semi-detached houses, which above their porches held picture windows where seasonal decorations—orange-paper pumpkins and black-paper hats for Halloween, Christmas tinsel, Easter baskets—announced the residents' fealty to the Christian calendar. The trees along the streets changed from horse chestnuts in the old section where he lived to dense lines of Norway maples.

A reader can, in the midst of all this lovingly recreated specificity, almost lose sight of the notion that David's is ultimately a two-pronged spiritual quest. Memory must first be made to yield, but then the language of its surrender must be given a careful burnish worthy of this rediscovered world. You get the feeling, by the story's close, that David's restoration is richer than the distant, dwindled events that inspired it. Updike—a marvelous critic—was especially delighted by, and illuminating in his analysis of, art's paradoxes. And here's a prime example of an ancient and ever-new miracle: the copy that turns out to be brighter and sharper-edged than the original.

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Brad Leithauser is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His new novel, The Art Student's War, will be published in November.

COMMENTS

I loved Updike's complex and beautiful writing, and one of his splendidly ambiguous lines from The Coup is a quote I offer people all the time: "The ignorant see miracles every day."

Updike was great at helping us see how we perceive things and, more important, how we evaluate them. As the article points out, he used magisterial language to describe ordinary events; he thus showed the way those events can be full of meaning and value to their observers, and he also thereby hinted at deeper, independent meanings that might or might not be all around us.

But I have to say that I didn't find the send-off that the literary world gave Updike to be as warm as the article claimed it was. Here in Slate, for example, we saw, along with a fair amount of praise, an article with a link to David Foster Wallace's critique of Updike as a "Champion Literary Phallocrat" and one of the "Great Male Narcissists."

It's funny and sad at once: I can't help wondering whether Wallace's own despair might have been less overwhelming if he had managed to take on a little of Updike's somewhat skeptical faith in the magnificence and importance of the world.

Updike's mixing of the erotic and the spiritual was, I think, was one of the great achievements of writing in English, and he deserved better than he got, in the end, from the professors and the critics. Of course, the real end hasn't come yet, and I suspect it won't ever come as long as Updike's books are available. Whether or not his faith in God was well-placed, Updike will have a nice long afterlife among people who love language and literature.

-- sextus empiricus
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