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

wishes that he could turn his nymphet inside out and gorge himself on her very organs. Updike unpeels and vivisects his characters in this way. (If humans do it, it's fair copy.) And so it is with all the other intimacies of thought and feeling. 'It's all in Couples,' he will concede. Or: 'The novels are a fair record of what I felt.' Or: 'It's all in the books.'
    It is also all in the New Yorker. When I was a student, living on the Iffley Road, Oxford, I sometimes wished that E.B. White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the New Yorker. It never happened. But it happened to Updike. He was at the Ruskin; the call came on the strength of early stories and proven versatility on the Harvard Lampoon. He was already married ('hand in hand, smaller than Hansel and GreteP), already a father. Pictured with his first child, he looks to me like an oddjobbing baby-sitter, willing and gentle enough, no doubt, but far too young to be of much use. He was twenty-three.
    'I left New York after only two years there. The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect. The literary atmosphere struck me as ugly, and still does. Resentful, poisonous, a squeezed feeling. I came up here to be out of harm's way: inaccessibility is the best way of saying no. But Boston is becoming an honorary borough of New York.'
    Under the enlightened patronage of the magazine — an unbroken relationship - Updike established himself in Ipswich, Mass. 'There was space here. We raised the children — or they seemed to raise themselves.' And so did the poems, stories and novels: earnest, gawky, forgiving, celebratory. He did his 'secluded and primitive' childhood in Olinger Stories and elsewhere, his dad in The Centaur, and his mum in Of the Farm. Fame, sophistication, modernity and wealth arrived with Couples (1968), when Updike did Ipswich.
    Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. Couples struck enough people this way, and was soon labelled 'the anatomy of a generation'. Its broad success also depended on a combination of the intensely literary and the near-pornographic. A cat's-cradle of vigorous adultery, as filtered through the sensibility of a modern James — or a modern Joyce. What Joyce did for the residents of Dublin, Updike recklessly offered to do for the dreamy dentists and Byronic building-contractors of 'Tarbox':
     
    . . . the neighbours' boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle. Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, resisting something, air. Eddie's Vespa but no Ford, Carol's car, He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment. I ache afterwards .. . Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.
     
    Didn't ease up. Pressed on. Five hundred pages like this. Couples is littered with brilliancies; but the smile and the flinch alternate too rapidly for the reader's comfort. The book seemed to be Updike's pinnacle at the time. Now it looks more like a shimmering false summit.
    Meanwhile, as New Yorker readers must have been only too aware, all was not well with the Updike marriage. The annual damage-checks were arriving in the form of the Maples Stories, worldly comedies of disintegration with titles like 'Waiting Up', 'Sublimating', 'Separating' and 'Divorcing: A Fragment'. Sample home truth, sample gallantry (the subject here is 'guilt-avoidance'):
     
    'I've decided to kick you out. I'm going to ask you to leave town.'
    Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. 'O.K.,' he said carefully. 'If you think you can manage.'
    . . . 'Things are stagnant,' she explained, 'stuck; we're not going anywhere.'
    'I will not give her up,' he interposed.
    'Don't tell me, you've told me.'
    'Nor do I see you giving him up.'
    'I would if you asked. Are you asking?'
    'No. Horrors. He's