Head of the Class

There is no single voice more expressive of the spiritual and intellectual temperament of America’s educated middle class than John Updike’s: wide-ranging, friendly to experience, deeply self-involved, calm, highly literate, provincial, fearful of too-close analysis, and ceaselessly energetic. And nowhere is his allegiance to the attitudes of that class and his participation in that culture more perfectly in evidence than in his criticism. “Due Considerations” (Knopf, 703 pages, $40), his sixth and latest collection of essays and criticism, is an enormous and polished book. Whatever other merits and defects it possesses, it shows that Mr. Updike’s energy has not flagged, even as he passes the middle of his eighth decade. It also serves as a testament — perhaps a final one, considering his age — to his literary conscience and conscientiousness. As he states in the preface:The pieces gathered here … are end products of an adolescent yearning to become a professional writer, or at least to enter in some guise into the mass of printed material that hung above the middle-browed middle class in the middle of the last century like a vast cloud gently raining ink.The language of this confession is a confession itself: balanced, scrupulous, honest, even in the careful, slight discord that “gently” introduces to enliven the passage’s end. “Due Considerations” delivers, for good and ill, on every promise implicit in the above lines.The book comprises nearly 150 pieces, varying in form from longer review-essays on everything from Robert Littell’s spy novel “Legends” to a new translation of the “Mabinogion,” the cycle of Welsh myth, to short, personal (almost private) statements of equal variety. Mr. Updike’s professionalism is visible at any length and on any subject: He seems just as game to tackle the imponderable in 500 words as in 3,000, and just as ready to expand on the history of American currency as Albrecht Dürer’s six visions of the Passion.In all of these pieces, Mr. Updike keeps his head. Even when assenting to and echoing the tidal enthusiasms for certain authors and books that arise among American critics, he does so in an evenhanded, modest way; even in reviewing a book as bathetic and self-aggrandizing as Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” he seeks out and praises the small good that can be found there.It’s difficult to see how it is, at a time when the language (and thus the judgment) of critics has undergone a general, near-hysterical inflation, that Mr. Updike’s reserve could function as a flaw. Especially when it exists concomitantly with the many unquestionable critical virtues Mr. Updike possesses: learning, philosophical involvement with literature, energy. And yet, somehow, it does: Again and again we come away from his criticisms feeling that, despite the intimate ease with which he speaks to us, he illumines very little. In a piece praising Robert Alter’s magisterial 2004 retranslation of the Pentateuch, Mr. Updike concludes with a facile allusion to Israel’s struggle to maintain its borders and the “contemporary crisis” it fuels. He sums up religious faith as “not so much a binary pole but a quantum state, which tends to vanish when closely examined,” a remark that sounds penetrating, but actually is both imagistically awkward and highly tendentious: Mr. Updike makes no mention of how specifically Protestant a vision of faith this is. His review of the catalog of a Harvard exhibition of Dürer’s various “Passions” reads, tragically, like meticulous plot summary. At precisely those moments when the critical temperament must shed its self-restraint, at the points of the most volatile contact between critic and subject, Mr. Updike seems to forever be shying away, restoring to the rich, stable, and familiar language of the dutiful, well-read appreciator. This tendency carries with it, it’s painful to say, a whiff of philistinism.John Updike is half a century older than I am, roughly. I inhabit a world that he played an enormous role in shaping, giving voice and form to the upward aspirations of post-Depression, post-World War II America — aspirations not merely economic but cultural. The fears and passions of his characters are my parents’ fears, and to no small extent my own. And his critical voice speaks the full authority of cultivated, bourgeois reason. Why, then, is this hollowness at the heart of his criticism so visible? Why are his sobriety and probity so frustrating? Because they make clear the essential predicament of the modern consumer of culture: a certain blindness, a dryness, a certain restrained self-involvement bred by our era’s insane abundance of literary and artistic production, and by its regularization. It is, presumably, the task of the critic to free himself of these impediments; Mr. Updike never quite manages to do this. Yet it’s difficult to consider “Due Considerations” a failure on these grounds. Even in its shortcomings, the book encapsulates perfectly the spirit of an epoch. The fault lies, I suppose, in our stars and in ourselves.Mr. Munson is the online editor of Commentary. He last wrote for these pages on Joyce Carol Oates.

Head of the Class

Head of the Class

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