Free Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis

with the other Midases of the age: the arbitrageur, the greenmail raider, the arms dealer, the video vicar.
    'My God,' he enthused as we sat, 'we're surrounded by all kinds of sick Americans.' The breakfast crowd in the Wang Center were wary in step and gesture. They were trussed in trusses, braced in braces, coated in powerful lotions, creams, elixirs. 'Bending and bowing in a variety of friezes', to quote from The Poorhouse Fair (1959), John Hoyer Updike's youthfully solemn first novel.
    All the illness on view had a tonic effect on me. After three weeks of holiday 'parenting' (Updike's word: his speech and prose are permissively sprinkled with modernisms like 'frontal', 'focusing', 'conflicted' and 'judgmental'), I felt like checking into Mass. General myself.
    'It makes a change', I said, 'from the triumphalism of the beach.'
    'My actinic caritosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. Look at that woman's glasses!' A lady groped by in what could have been a pair of welder's goggles. 'I guess she really doesn't want any light in her eyes. My God, look at him!'
    As Updike feasted his senses on the scene, I reached grimly for the tape-recorder. He hesitated. 'We're not really going to do this, are we? We're just going to have a nice chat,' he said, prophetically enough, 'and then you're going to go home and write a long piece about me and my work.'
     
    Lauded, harassed, honoured, microinspected, Updike is by now simply stoical about the 'attention' his work attracts. And he is a gentleman, and a good old pro. The enemies of promise — or of reasonable productivity — used to be Hollywood, fancy journalism, alcohol, and so on. These days the main enemy is being interviewed. Updike could spend his life doing little else. In a recent New Yorker he published a story (and it is a full-time job keeping up with Updike: everywhere you look he is blurting out essays, poems, memoirs, reviews) in which a dissident Czech poet yearns to be rearrested and put back in jail, so that he can write some verse and stop being interviewed.
    'A Korean professor might come and torment me for an hour. German TV keeps thinking it wants to stop by. A number of American universities are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. Once a year or so I rise early and do Good Morning America. It's kind of a raffish experience. You go in all groggy and sit in the Green Room with Mel Tormé or the father of seventeen girls or some such celebrity of the moment.
    'Writers can get over-interviewed. The whole performance indicates that you are quite a swell fellow just by being you, whereas we know that what merit we have, if any, resides elsewhere. It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.'
    Updike can hardly complain - and he doesn't complain — about the abrasions of self-exposure, because he has taken care of all that in his stories and novels. For some reason (won't anyone tell us why?), modern fiction tends towards the autobiographical, and American fiction more than most, and John Updike more than any. The tendency is still regarded as a 'flaw', in Updike and in general; but one might as usefully accuse Shakespeare for having, in his tragedies, a 'weakness' for kings and noblemen and warriors. The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are now.
    Yet the case of Updike is unquestionably extreme. The textural contrast between your first and second wife's pubic hair, for instance, is something that most writers feel their readers can get along without. The novelists of yesteryear would gallantly take leave of their creations at the bedroom door. Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a little Japanese camera crew in there after them. Humbert, in Lolita,