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

all I've got.'
     
    Soon, young David Updike was publishing his account of the divorce, in the New Yorker. Then Updike's mother ('I'm in a writer sandwich,' says Updike warily) weighed in with her version, in the New Yorker. 'I've gotten used to being written about,' says his ex-wife Mary, quoted (for a change) in the New York Times. Open marriages are not often as open as this. The loop, I mean to say, the circuit or the food chain, is shockingly brief. There is something predatory or vampiric in it - a hint of domestic cannibalism. It represents a kind of love to set these things down, as Updike has always claimed ('loving if not flattering'), and a kind of fidelity too. But a writer's kind, and therefore quite ruthless.
     
    The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly, to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview. A personality is more palatable than a body of work, so all the faceting and detail of the life and writing is subsumed into thumbnail approximation. Who is John Updike? A garrulous adulterer who lives near the sea? By rights, he should have turned up at Mass. General with lipstick on his collar, and then disappeared every ten minutes to supervise abortions for Mabel and Missy and Charity and Hope. For the record, he was charm incarnate. But as for what Updike is like — in his head, in his private culture — I knew all that already.
    In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity. The brain itself is serendipitous and horrendously encyclopaedic: he knows about home improvement ('twenty feet of 2" pine, quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1 ½" finishing nails'), music ('the gigue was marked allegro. It began with some stabbing phrases — dit-duh (a-d), dit-duh (b-c)'), cars ('padded tilt steering wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory-installed AM/FM/MPX'), trees ('the sapling sugar maples and the baby red oaks'), computers ('rotate (molecule (protein 293)) (angles (from alpha) (to delta) (steps (*0.001 (– delta alpha))))'), painting ('she halts in the pose of Michelangelo's slave, of Munch's madonna, of Ingres' urn-bearer'), boats ('Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshoff 12½"), photosynthesis ('the five-sixths of the triosephosphate pool that does not form starch is returned to ribulose 5-phosphate'), pornography, theology, nuclear physics, lino-typing, gold futures, aerodynamics, Africa, cookery, cosmogony and I don't know what-all. The unblinkingness of his eye is opposed to the mighty wooziness of his heart. He is a romantic, an Arcadian, a tremendous (and not always a tasteful) yearner for purity, innocence, the cadences of goodness. He is greedy, androgynous, devout, determined, intolerably sentimental and unforgivably bright.
    What makes this chaos meaningful, and what lifts the work from the merely phenomenal, is the way time is acting on it. Countervailingly, and increasingly, Updike's prose is sour, withering, crafty, painfully comic. Such an immersion in the physical world, it seems, will tend not towards nostalgia but towards an invigorating and majestic cynicism. Mortality and its terrors were the fount of much of the early mawkishness; now they form the backing for a new robustness, a humorous pessimism that Updike has fatalistically embraced.
    'Yes, it's another part of me, isn't it?' he says. 'Maybe it's the best part of me. It's funny that I can be so sour when I'm such a sunny, cheerful individual. But when I get going on it. . .'
    'It comes.'
    'It comes. It comes.'
    It comes in the revitalised form of Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, the vulgar bohunk he left behind in Pennsylvania. Rabbit is not the 'Updike who never went to Harvard', as some commentators claim; he is part of Updike's