Recent Fiction
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Unnatural youth has long been a theme for John Updike, whose characters, like Henry Bech, cheerfully walk backwards, keeping their eyes on the girls, into middle age and beyond. These characters trip and fall rarely; Updike is content with a deft stumble. In fact his 21st novel, “Villages,” (Knopf, 321 pages, $25) presents a world in which sex is safer than ever before.
Owen Mackenzie is a virgin when he marries his MIT sweetheart, Phyllis. Owen’s innocence never quite leaves him; in fact, it becomes the engine that drives his many subsequent adulteries. After a few years of small-town matrimony with Phyllis in New England, Owen realizes that “Another step in his education was due.” One lover summarizes his inadvertent appeal: “What a wicked man you turn out to be, you funny dear. You’re such a puppy.”
Mr. Updike’s marriage of innocence and amorality can be, if not frustrating, slightly boring.
The 1960s and 1970s become, in “Villages,” not a time of distress, but a sunny season. “Sex was then thought to be innocent even if its practitioners weren’t.” Throughout Owen’s story, the author mentions astronauts, or Chappaquiddick, or the advent of jogging, always emphasizing these dire events’ distance from Owen’s more unserious affairs.
Mr. Updike verges on an analogy between sexual liberation and the paradigm shifts of Owen’s work as a programmer. But the computing motif is only a new verbal toy for Updike’s restless linguistic imagination.: “mirrors sweated as the heat of the packed bodies interfaced with the cold walls.”
But readers who found the recent “Gertrude and Claudius” or “Seek My Face” overwhelmed by unusual motifs will find “Villages” a welcome return to suburban form. While still an undergraduate, Phyllis moons over Cantor’s set theory: “Hilbert said nobody will ever expel us from the Paradise Cantor created. Isn’t that nice?” It is.
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Like Mr. Updike, Mark Helprin’s worldview is stamped on every sentence he writes. “The sky in Venice is too often the color of the Financial Times, but that night it was laden with stars,” he writes. For Mr. Helprin, poignancy depends upon worldliness.
The same historical omniscience that Mr. Helprin’s great novels assert obtains in his new story collection, “The Pacific,” (Penguin Press, 366 pages, $25.95) which encompasses the world of opera, South America, the Pacific theater, Chasidic Williamsburg, Israel, Melville’s work in the New York Harbor, and September 11.
His best characters are old men who look back at their youth, scorning the preoccupations of middle age. “I think it may be that, very early on, as if the lens of time were distorted, a boy can see way over the fence, as if he’s lived his life near to the end, in a kind of clairvoyance.” Worldly experience, for Mr. Helprin, begets sentiment and quixotic honor.
The resolute gentlemen of Mr. Helprin’s stories are sometimes too good to be true: an honest contractor who decides to work for free, an old impresario who begs a new talent to put off her career. But if Mr. Helprin, like many authors, uses history as a convenient means to develop his characters, at least his characters do develop.
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The temerity of a Great American Novel, with its needy, extroverted claim on our society, is hard to admire. Russel Banks, the author of “The Sweet Hereafter,” left his tried and true materials – the chilly small towns of North America – for a historical epic, 1998’s “Cloudsplitter,” a tale of John Brown’s son. His new book, “The Darling,” (HarperCollins, 385 pages, $25.95) is shorter, but similarly stretched.
“The Darling” looks at first like a Great American Salad. Mr. Banks’s hero is Hannah Musgrave, who becomes involved with the Weathermen, goes underground, and ends up in Liberia. Utopian activism becomes principled realpolitik and finally, her story is an exaggerated parable of the Baby Boomer generation.
Political and historical baggage aside, Hannah’s tale is one of innocence embarrassed by its pretensions to experience. Her self-appraisals can be painfully noir: “When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well.”
When Hannah calls herself “hard-as-nails,” for example, she is making fun of herself. By the novel’s end, Hannah decides that, in light of September 11, “her life could have no significance in the larger world. “This disavowal seems disingenuous. She believes that a leftist life lived underground facilitates an escapist urge: “That’s the real American Dream, don’t you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear and later reappear as someone else.”
It is hard to tell whether Mr. Banks fully approves of Hannah’s conceits. His overreaching plot and sometimes grandiose, sometimes flat prose suggest that he does not weigh Hannah’s self-regard as ironically as some readers will.