Free Updike by Adam Begley Page A

from which George (“that sad silly man”) is excluded—the “romance” of mother and son is far more compelling than that of husband and wife. But here, too, there’s a breach. When Peter wanders in the city of Alton, alone and unencumbered, excited by what seem to him cosmopolitan delights, and feeling released from his everyday world and its galling inconsequence, he realizes that relishing urban freedom is a kind of betrayal:
    I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control or protect me, my mother with her farm . . . her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal. . . . [O]f her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me vengeful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.
    More than a sign of solidarity with his father, Peter’s preference for Alton (and Olinger) is bound up with a defiant impulse—a rebellion against his mother.
    She’s the same woman in The Centaur , in “Pigeon Feathers,” and in “Flight”—all three present an unmistakable likeness of Linda Updike. It’s always the mother’s decision to haul her family out of Olinger to the farmhouse in Firetown that underpins the action, whether it’s trying to return home ( The Centaur ), trying to leave home (“Flight”), or solving a crisis triggered by the “upset” of having moved home (“Pigeon Feathers”). Her act of will becomes, in a sense, his inspiration. Updike acknowledged as much, obliquely, in “Cemeteries,” an essay he wrote in 1969 and published in the Transatlantic Review . He recalls a visit to the family burial plot in Plowville with his mother, who wanted him to agree to be buried there, next to his parents. He avoided saying yes, but felt the urge to disguise the “evasion” with some banter and buffoonery. He asks himself, “Why is it that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself . . . ?” For the first decade of his writing life, it was the very real fact of Linda’s great drama (her Plowville paradise regained) that fed his fiction.
    Updike poured into The Centaur not just his feelings about his parents but also all the intimate experience he had of small-town high school, both as a student and as the son of a teacher. The janitor with his broom, the other teachers with their quirky self-importance, the lecherous supervising principal, the basketball games, the swim meets—all are intently observed and transferred onto the page with energy and wit. Peter’s schoolmates, both en masse and in particular, are portrayed with unsentimental rigor. They’re mostly dull and ordinary kids, but as a group they’re somehow thrilling—collectively capable of a “gaudy and momentous” gesture. Part of Peter knows that he’s a cut above, college-bound, destined to achieve a worldly success beyond the grasp of his Olinger cohort, but he’s still desperate to hold his place in his chosen clique. He’s divided between his high aspirations (he wants to be a painter; he venerates Vermeer) and the wish to emulate his shiftless idol, Johnny Dedman, who “performed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coördination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted peanuts into his mouth.” Peter’s relationship with his girlfriend, Penny, is typical. * He describes her as “small and not unusual,” thinks of her as his “poor little dumb girl,” and speculates that it’s a “delicate irresolution of feature” that makes her, just possibly, “worthy” of him. And yet, despite the disdain he fails occasionally to conceal—he is, after all, an “atrocious ego”—he loves her as best he can. We’re told, toward the end of the novel, that Peter sees “other people as an arena for self-assertion,” a harsh judgment but not