R A Card

A brief history of being young & adrift in 80s New York.

In my young twenties I moved to Brooklyn. At the time moving to Brooklyn was a ritual experience for many young people, like moving to Paris between the world wars must have been, I suppose, or Los Angeles would be for certain cultural adventurers in the 2010s. It was the 80s, before New York became a fairytale mecca, and along with discovering yourself you could also discover multi-chambered LIRR stations with long- shuttered coffee and flower shops, shoe-shine stations, or you could take the train into Times Square and experience the smug seediness of the genuine article, and claim to be living an outré, bohemian life. You could, in other words, still live in relative comfort for not too much money, provided your requirements for comfort entailed no more than an occasional slice of pizza or a few beers on the weekend.

My roommate and I lived quite shabbily in a one-bedroom off DeKalb with a backyard garden we neglected, and a heater that inexplicably turned off on weekends, as if anticipating that we were going to be away in Vermont or the Hamptons, which of course we never were. On all sides, our neighborhood was hemmed in by other neighborhoods where drug deals went down and people were occasionally murdered in rank, dispirited walk-ups. But our street and two or three that ran parallel to ours were shaded with ancient oaks and London Plain trees, there was a park nearby where we would play tennis, and I would run, doing endless loops on a hard-packed path. It had once been solidly middle class but was between prosperous periods now.

Next to our apartment building was a grand abandoned hotel with a marble staircase more or less intact. Sometimes my roommate and I scaled the rusted-out fire escape between the buildings to the fourth story to get inside. You had to stretch your body its full extent and jerk through an open window, a foolhardy move that could have resulted in catastrophe. But once in, you had free rein. Everywhere was debris, horsehair plaster, broken glass, wet slabs of cardboard, wreckage we pawed through in search of some kind of glittering souvenirs. I don’t recall ever discovering anything of value or interest but it was just as well; material evidence of our adventures was superfluous. Phantoms always exerted the most powerful psychic force on me. I’d come to Brooklyn to commune with the likes of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, who I imagined hovering among the wharfs and printing rooms and ale houses. I wanted to merge with intangible presences, impressing centuries’ of layered ghosts into the crannies of the novel I was writing.

To make ends meet, my roommate got a job with a company that collated dossiers on big businesses. Pretty soon he was making a halfway decent salary. For my part, I was barely keeping alive, financially speaking. I had a couple jobs, one teaching English part-time at a yeshiva, another as a ticket taker at a Manhattan cinema that no longer exists. I often borrowed money from him to cover the rent, and paid him back a few weeks later. A cycle as futile as it was routine. I was forever in small debt to him; and he was forever being outwardly tolerant of the situation. His bed was in the apartment’s only bedroom, mine was in the living room, an arrangement that didn’t seem to cause as much debate or grief as one had a right to expect. We’d been friends in college, and were used to each other, no doubt, and instinctively knew to defer to each other’s claim to the kitchen or the demoralized blue couch he’d brought to the apartment—a luxury, if you could call it that, that made me feel so grown up. Until that time, I hadn’t been acquainted with anyone my age who owned living room furniture.

My roommate was an actor, often away on auditions or seeing plays. Most every free minute I wrote. My novel, about a Confederate soldier, Thomas Leroix, who’d ended up in Kansas after the war, trying to make peace with his memories, was progressing at a steady pace. I’d traveled a fair bit in the South, enough, so I assumed, to unflinchingly assimilate the magnolia-scented horrors of its past into the pages of the book.

Nowadays manuscripts, I assume, are released into existence as if summoned from a hushed electronic ether (in fact I’m writing this on a laptop), no more tactile than a passing thought, but then I typed on an electric typewriter. And the once-ubiquitous sound of typewriters—the commiserative hum of electric motors, the stored words tumbling forward in a clacking barrage—elicits in me now a keening nostalgia for sitting at what passed as our dining room table, as Brooklyn nights gathered outside. Doubtless typing wasn’t so romantic to my roommate when he was home watching Barney Miller behind the closed bedroom door, smoking the sample cigarettes they gave out in the street then to keep you hooked or get you started. Sometimes it woke him up in the middle of the night, and I’d whisper apologies through his door. I spent hardly any time on the lesson plans, trying to squeeze in as much time writing as possible. But thus did the strange novel grow, astonishingly, page upon page compounding upon our dining table.

I was, of course, eager to get out of the apartment too. I’d take the subway—and, appeasing ever-shifting exigencies of time and money, seldom paid the fare. I’ll admit to feeling some niggling shame, but a subway token (emblem of an evergreen, irretrievable New York: brass-colored with a silver bullseye center) cost, if I recall, a dollar, not nothing for someone in my position. So I became adept at hopping turnstiles, perfecting a means of slipping through the gates undetected by the station attendants, who presided in their bulletproof glass booths like abbots in their personal refectories. It was thrilling to be able to get around the city for free, riding to the far-flung polarities of Rockaway, Sheepshead Bay, Pelham Bay Park, as if under new-found power. Unbound from my desk, I’d explore regions of the city so far-flung it was quite possible that denizens of one section had no more idea of the existence of the other than South Seas islanders had of emirs of the Ottoman Empire. In warmer weather, I’d bicycle through Prospect Park, sucking in exhaust fumes. Nights speeding down Flatbush, Bedford Avenue, where Ebbetts Field used to stand, past check cashing and pizza joints, Dirty Bud’s Recovery Room, the original Juniors, which staked out the corner of Dekalb and Flatbush like an extravagant, generous-hearted hooker—a thrilling manumission, an avowal of the untempered joy that seized my body, as when I learned to ride on the tar-and-gravel streets of the Boston suburbs of my boyhood. Sometimes I’d run along the pedestrian walk on the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the most dazzling spectacles in the country, gazing out at the Liberty Statue, the Twin Towers, and down at the gray river coursing out to sea. In awe of such moments, one felt genuine patriotism and pride in a country in which it wasn’t always easy to lay claim to such unfashionable feelings.

To be poor in New York is to be forever looking in at a rarefied and glittering bubble, a gilded shelter; but the vantage of the poor can sometimes afford the greater prospect, I like to think: the perspective of a threadbare god. The booth of the movie theater where I worked faced 7th Avenue; from this angle a ticket seller would look out at the steady procession of pedestrians strolling by, some of whom would stop and talk to us through the intercom. The wealthy, the destitute, the lost… the intercom amplified their voices over the street’s jabber and strife, as if petitioning a convenient deity. One guy, a regular, a small conspiratorial man in a suit jacket three times too big for him and his few remaining teeth situated far back in his mouth, had been, he said, a trumpeter in a famous jazz combo decades ago. Hard times had befallen him, he didn’t have to say. He’d regale us with stories of long-defunct jazz clubs, Chet Baker, Ellington. Then you’d see him around town sometimes, telling the same stories to people who could turn their backs to him.

A coworker of mine, the son of an actor you’d recognize from tv and a few movies, was always bowled over at characters like this. He’d grown up in New York, presumably, but for some reason the New York scenes and characters he must have been around since birth remained forever novel, his capacity for astonishment perennially refreshed. Look at that guy, he’d say, clamping his forehead with his hand. Can you believe it? Over and over again. Look at that guy. He was right, of course. There were characters in New York. There were always people of all kinds to look at. One night after the movie had been playing a while, Bob Dylan came in with Merry Clayton, the singer of the indelible Rape, murder… line in the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Dylan must have been in a down phase, musically speaking; he looked like he was trying to keep up, fashion-wise.

Still, there are few people more universally Dylan-like than Dylan; and in the middle of the movie he wandered into the lobby, his eyes even in repose had a wary, quicksilver flash of a fox’s with a chicken in its jaws. I thought to say something to him, talk to him like I was talking through the window in the ticket booth, but didn’t see the point.

Everything you had to know about him, I figured, you already got from the songs and the cowboy boots he was wearing. Before the movie finished, he and Merry Clayton slipped out. Susan Sontag, Bill Murray, other music and literature and movie people also came in sometimes, but my life was peripheral to all that then, it was starting out on its own course, and would, I hope, find its way too.

My boss at the cinema later became a pretty well-known film critic. The two of us would go together to broken-down theaters near Times Square, the Upper West Side and the Village. They smelled in those days, universally, of dereliction and pee, and showed scratched-up prints of old John Wayne westerns, Bergman, the standard Fassbinder or Goddard or Buñuel repertory. The ticket takers, seen-it-all boys my age, or gray Beat eminences, ran fingers down their lists before admitting us. In one such palace, around 42nd Street, a glum joint that sometimes screened porn, we watched a movie that was to become a personal favorite. The Last Picture Show. If you haven’t seen it, do. The Last Picture Show (1971) yielded a thousand vicarious thrills, mostly to do with the romance of watching lives decompose in a simulacrum of real time. On the screen, the textured Texas wastelands, on the periphery of civilization, showed an America forever endangered, intended to be plowed under. It was in The Last Picture Show that I heard Hank Williams for the first time, singing “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” as if from a new grave. In Picture Show’s landscape, doors were always rattling on loose hinges. Tumbleweeds cartwheeled in dust-blown streets. In one scene, arguably one of the most affecting in the history of American cinema, a gym teacher’s wife (Cloris Leachman) confronts her high-school age lover (Timothy Bottoms), who scarcely knows how or where his decency got lost. His eyes hold out hope for redemption he knows can’t be given. Hers is a quintessentially and exclusively American face, like one in a Walker Evans picture, its frayed edges abounding in patriotism. Hurling a coffee pot against a wall, Cloris herself abounds in gestures of love and regret. We wait. Wracked. Rooting for her but thinking, too late, too late. Hank Williams sings. A boy is killed—a narrative jolt that feels precisely right in its recognition that life owes nothing. The lights of the theater come up. We stretch our legs and leave. Outside a glorious spring afternoon. New York suddenly seems small, provincial, its bluster something disagreeable and gratuitous.

I stayed in New York a few months after that. I took another part-time job, tutoring a student on the Upper East Side. It was almost summer, a few nights a week I hopped the Lexington line to an apartment on York and the 90s, where I tutored the girl in English and history; but after a while it became apparent that the tutoring agency that had hired me was a con, I hadn’t received a single check. I left messages that weren’t returned, and ended up in court with a bunch of other duped tutors. The defendant didn’t show, of course; we tutors, having won our case, departed the courtroom single file, having spent yet another day chasing paychecks we knew we’d never get. It didn’t matter. It felt like New York was drifting away, its demonstrations familiar, its conclusions forgone. Since coming here, I’d adored the bleak dispirited cinemas, streets sweetly nourished by perfumes of uptown matrons. But the time was coming. The city had grown wary of sustaining the ambitions it had cultivated in the young people who’d come to it. Notice was being given—local scrip would no longer be redeemable.

Later, after the school year had worn to a close and the yeshiva students all went off to lives they’d be living thereafter, I quit both jobs. I left my roommate to keep the apartment for himself and took a Greyhound cross-country, to California, then flew to Hawaii. I’d only the vaguest plans, but the idea of getting a job somewhere in the tropical line offered the least resistance to castaway fantasies I’d semi-nursed since watching Swiss Family Robinson on tv as a kid. Eventually I got hired by a scuba and fishing shop on a harbor on the outskirts of Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island. South Pacific trades wafted from the ocean, criss-crossing lava fields and a too-ambitious parking lot that belonged to the strip-mallish conglomeration of buildings where I worked. Here I could write for long stretches, interrupted only by the few straggling tourists looking for recommendations on tuna and marlin rigs or cheap snorkel gear for the kids.

My novel of Thomas Leroix, the disaffected Confederate creature, was almost a thousand pages by this time. But still no closer to being finished, I was afraid. We’d been together, the obsessive, reclusive Leroix and I, two or three years, I was his eager valet, carrying his hat and dueling pistols. Responsible for his dinners and despairs. We’d both managed to find ourselves in unexpected precincts—him in Kansas, me in Kona—looking for denouement. In my Ali’i Drive apartment, geckos scaled the screens like mountain climbers, munching palmetto bugs, and I woke no roommate, disturbed no lovers in adjoining rooms. Only the nocturnal geckos were there to regard me—their skeptical eyes and chops that would have munched me too if they could.

Tropical nights, fragrant of banana plants, oceans, night-blooming jasmine, came and went in splendid uniformity. It rained only at night, so it seemed, great sky-cleansing tempests hammering the tin roofs of nearby houses. Then the mornings reposed in rainless luxury, the lava fields dried before the sun was fully risen. New York, half a world away, never did exist in Kailua-Kona’s consciousness, I thought. The islands were geological in reasoning, massive active volcanos plunging seven thousand feet to the bottom of the Pacific, and pressed no immediate demands upon a writer, culturally speaking, as Brooklyn had. The images I was trying to summon—the Civil War’s splurge of carnage, Thomas Leroix’s regiment trudging along a mountain ridge, half-buried corpses exposed by the rain—had no analog in the lava and banyan and coconut palms.

Stranded upon a shore far from the East River, staring out to another sea, I could work with little mental interruption. “God keep me from ever completing anything,” says Ishmael/Melville in Moby-Dick. “This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” Aye, but the least one is ever offered is a draft of a life, a draft of a draft, before the words drift away upon the trades.

Reconsidering the supreme stylist’s status in the canon.

I

n September of 2013, the Library of America issued canonical editions of John Updike’s collected stories, adding to the slim stand-alone volume, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, published three years earlier. Then in 2018 and 2020 respectively, the Library put out Updike’s novels (Selected Novels 59-65, and Selected Novels 68-75). With the exception of Hub Fans, of major American poets/writers in our lifetimes, John Ashbery, Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, all had beat Updike in admission to the Library’s pantheon. Perhaps the omission was related to publishing rights or some other ungratifyingly arcane matter, but one might also have suspected a snub. Nevertheless, it is gratifying to find Updike, while celebrated in life as one of the most nuanced chroniclers of his generation, finally getting a seat at the afterlife-accredited writers table. Updike’s working life as a writer extended roughly from 1954, when he graduated Harvard College and his stories started appearing in the New Yorker, to the early twenty-first century, when the last novel, Terrorist, was published. Along the way came novels, stories, poetry, critical essays, personal reminiscences, incidental bits and pieces, in an unrelieved torrent, more words than a reader could possibly hope to keep up with in a lifetime of summer reading. For some, this was not a sign of a brilliant prolificness, but of post-war work ethic of a Pennsylvania autodidact, or a logorrheic pathology. Among prominent practitioners in the lit-crit business, David Foster Wallace, James Wood, Harold Bloom, had taken a rather dim view of Updike’s oeuvre. His facility, versatility, subject matter, were somehow signs of suspect gifts, like those of a speedy shortstop who hits fifteen or twenty home runs a season. Bloom included only Witches of Eastwick, surely a minor if popular novel, in his grab-bag compendium of canonization-worthy world literature, The Western Cannon, tacitly damning Updike with faint praise. Wood was even more dismissive. “If one is always blearily swimming towards the raison d’être of these stories, it is largely the prose which is slowing one’s passage. The sentences have an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract.” Yet even as Updike’s immense powers inevitably tailed off (Terrorist is an attempt to graft the usual obsessions of sex and domestic roiling onto the contemporary scene, and almost every page has something clumsy and essentially witless in it), and exposed him as occasionally limited in emotional and thematic range, the true gift—of generosity, sly love, his canny aptitude at translating shapes and sounds to metaphor—remained, if you ask me, pulsating. Despite its essential miscalculation, in Terrorist we still encounter throwaway nuggets that approach prime Updike. “His grandfather had shed all religion in the New World, putting all faith in a revolutionized society, a world where the powerful could no longer rule through superstition, where food on the table, decent housing and shelter, replaced the untrustworthy promises of an unseen God.” It isn’t, as Wood suggests, dutiful prose, but a pulse that simultaneously contracts and expands through the prose like electric current. Updike’s bracing last poems, collected in Endpoint, are mostly shorn of fancy writing, and present lives that ignite and flare out in fractions of a second, the way lives do. The poems are existential missives, child-like in the declarative affection that animated his fiction at its best.

They’ve been in my fiction, both now dead,
Peggy just recently, long stricken (like
my grandma) with Parkinson’s disease.
But what a peppy knockout Peggy was!—
cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.
Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s
eye, but she was too much girl for me….

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso—

or, regarding his own life and posterity:

A life poured into words—apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read?

Library of America has placed its bets that readers born in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first century will, finding sentences, characters, stories, worthy of their attention; that the ancient Protestant steeples, putting greens and suburbanites’ messy extra-marital couplings will continue to resonate in the America of, say, 2045.

The past recedes into a vanishing point. Some authors, almost before the body goes cold, are relegated to ash heaps of their time. I for one am frequently puzzled how readers of the mid-nineteenth century could have found much merit in the works of some of its most beloved writers. Longfellow, William Gilmore Simms, even Harriet Beecher Stowe seem to me tediously sentimental, superficial, possessing a sclerotic mannerliness that seldom transcends the prose conventions their own era. It can happen to the best of ‘em, I know. Recently I purchased Library of America’s edition of Henry James’ Notes of a Son and Brother, and A Small Boy and Others, which for decades had been available only in backroom library copies, or on the shelves of obsessive Jamesians. I worship the meticulously witnessed The Bostonians, Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, and shorter tales (What Maisie Knew, Aspern Papers…), but struggled mightily to find a clear path into the late period James of A Small Boy. Its tics, throat clearings and genealogical obsessions seemed to coerce the reader into joining James in wandering the labyrinths of his own mind, or that of the amanuensis as he dictated in his cottage in Kent, with nary a helpful guide in sight. Likewise, one wonders if some of Updike’s novels might belong to the past’s un-resonant designs, the literary equivalent of a Dodge Dart, say: in the years between his graduation from Harvard and the post 9/11 collapse of politically heterogeneous but coherent-seeming America, Updike—increasingly, unfashionably, white, privileged, male—had become at risk of becoming an awkward counter to America’s twenty-first century polyglot growth spurt—not just in the academy but in popular imagination. His tales, like those of John Cheever or John O’Hara or Sinclair Lewis of earlier generations, might be read simply as the outrageous hijinks of a vanished tribe. Moreover, Updike’s fixations on the anatomical, his unrelieved male gaze, and tacit endorsement of social coherence over the wildly, vividly anarchic, were unfashionable even at their peak, as if he were the privileged passive recipient of all that 60s and 70s free love and protesting and cultural ferment, without himself bothering to make much contribution to it. Compared to, say, Mailer’s boisterous chronicling of his ramblings with Robert Lowell in midst of march on the Pentagon protests in The Armies of the Night, Updike’s tales of Joan and Richard Maple marching in a 60s Boston protest while their marriage dissolves, or his patronizing description of the African-American radical, Skeeter, in Rabbit Redux, as “finely made electric toy,” can be read as an enshrining of privileged liberal assumptions, valuing irony over earnestness, preserving the status quo through dabbling in radical chic.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern the line between Updike and his alter-egos. We’re not sure whose mind we’re in, or what side we’re supposed to take. When Rabbit declares, “‘I hate [taking the bus]… It stinks of Negroes,’” one wonders if one is supposed to reel in disgust at Rabbit’s casual racism, or nod in assent. Pleasure or pain can provoke —or barely elicit moral upheaval. When Jill Pendleton, the runaway teenager living with Rabbit and Skeeter, dies in a fire, it hardly registers an emotional tremor. A cop asks if she was a loved one, and Rabbit answers, “‘Not exactly.’” Her erotic value, her life, obliterated, Rabbit moves on. Her carnality may have been splendid, but once it’s gone, the memory leaves little emotional trace. One wonders if this is the chilly flip side of what David Foster Wallace meant when he claimed, “that for the young educated adults of the 60’s and 70’s, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Mr. Updike’s evocation of the libidinous self appeared redemptive and even heroic”?

It’s hardly Rabbit’s greatest moment, but Updike resists easy summing up, and Mr Wallace’s faint grumbling strikes one as an adolescent fantasy of tearing down daddy’s house. We root for Rabbit as a heroic figure, flawed but decent in a modern semi-corrupt way. Halfway decent people can be profound assholes. Assholes can have their little moments of redemption. But Updike often refuses to give easy ways out. In Couples, the Rabbit quartet, The Centaur, or a parcel of other novels and stories, Updike’s America never settles into convenient taxonomies. We have to do the work of separating the characters from the books. But—and this is what separates Updike from lesser mortals—in sentence after sentence, his prose enlists us in rapturous delight in the ongoing project of American democracy. Regardless of what you think of Rabbit’s boorishness, he shares with his creator a multi-sensorial observational quality, and his observations, filtered through a writerly consciousness, at least partly atone for a great appetitive, American-style sense of entitlement. As with Thoreau’s observations of the skirmishes of his beloved ants at Walden, we get a sense of Updike carefully superintending his characters’ behaviors, relishing them punching it out in a not-always accommodating world. In their corner, he nudges them onward.

It’s also worth noting that, although Updike’s books range in scope, geographically speaking, so many of his characters—the golfers, ministers, carpenters, professorial types, warlocks, car salesmen—toil in familiar Updike real estate: the cloistered suburbs of the Northeast. The suburbs often get a bad rap from denizens of urban, hipper precincts; but in Updike’s hands, they function as literary metaphor, and one of his more tantalizingly realized characters. Even suburban weather can be characteristic, signaling the presence of god, or a shadowed shabby-picturesque domestic doom: “Autumn is starting to show its underside: out of low clouds like a row of torn mattresses a gray rain is knocking the leaves off one of the trees. That lonely old maple behind the Chuck Wagon across Route 111.…” On these streets, we seek, along with the author, links between the dismal and sublime, the sacred and profane. Fallen or otherwise, such suburban paradises are the loci of eternal drama. Worn-in, worn-out lives often stir and peter out not in existential angst, but in a low-level worriedness. Sunny vistas contain essences of mortality: bodily disintegration is dissonantly unforeseen in the midst of the grassy, glitzy bounty.

Part of being a Big Man (perhaps less so, Woman) Writer is that you’re expected to be a colossus, not merely a reporter of the minutia of the passing parade. Melville, Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Faulkner, bestriding the empire, rip through whole towns and countries with insatiable appetites, their tomes rippling with Big Themes. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” Melville says. “No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” In his way Updike was indeed trying to write a mighty book on the flea, reporting minutia from the neighborhoods. As a would-be Big Man of American literature, however, his stature rests not upon a singular novel or two, but, like Balzac, upon a collected oeuvre spanning more than half a century. His individual books, with perhaps the exceptions of Rabbit is Rich or Rabbit at Rest, are not tour de forces, but carefully observed tableaus, sociologically and culturally engorged, bursting at the margins, but whaling trips are not undertaken, wars aren’t fought, there are no epic cross-country journeys of self-discovery. The Bigness comes from an accretion of detail that over fifty years develops into an American La Comédie humaine. Several years ago I reread the four Rabbit novels (and one short postscript included in Licks of Love, a short story collection) over the course of a couple months. I’d read all of them years before, but in a haphazard, rather casual manner. The experience of reading them in sequence, however, left me reeling: starting in 1960 with Rabbit, Run, Updike checked in with Rabbit roughly every decade, taking him from a young man who, like the post-high school hanger-on in Richard Linklatter’s in Dazed and Confused, dimly senses his own limitations, aware that he’s living a prolonged afterlife, but holds to it as long as he can because he knows, somewhere in his American soul, that that’s all his life has to offer, to an adulthood of some unexpected material and spiritual attainment, a self-indulgent but humbled oldster, hustling to keep up on a basketball court. Rabbit’s individual experiences are greater than their sum, as perhaps all of ours will be. He dreams, plots, feuds, parents disastrously, loves perhaps slightly less disastrously, plays some golf, hawks cars, goes somewhere but not where he intended. But the books are greater than their parts. To read them quickly is to witness the increments of a life, days accumulating as years, fads, fashions, politics, passing so quickly that you hardly recognize a summary is in the works.

Mr Wallace criticized Updike for his obsessions with sex and mortality, but these are the obsessions of the flesh—organic modalities with which we cling to existence. The usual bourgeois trappings (all those Chuck Wagons) may eventually eradicate the enduring maple, but in the meantime (that is, our existence) we find our way, coming to terms with tensions of earthly strife and strive. Updike’s shopping malls, beaches, afternoon football games, like James Agee’s hissing sprinklers on summer lawns, or Wallace Stevens’ “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” provided context from the Eisenhower administration through the Obama; it seems, however, a writer’s observational powers, like that of space telescopes, are trained upon a fixed quadrant of the sky. Writers serve their times and are served by them, and in their deaths take the era with them (Updike died of lung cancer in 2009). I have no doubt that, had he been born in 1530, Updike would have turned out perfectly formed sonnets, but, as a conscientious, orderly writer, perhaps would have been less fine a chronicler of near-mid-twenty-first century’s hectic mayhem. Still, the prose remains in its equipoise and aptitude, elevating the quotidian to the noble. “The shade of the brick pavement under the streetlamp was the purple of wine dregs,” a character in Couples observes on a late-night walk. “Piet noticed a small round bug scurrying along a crevice: a citizen out late, seen from a steeple. No voice to call him home. Motherless. Fatherless.” On Updikean turf, bugs and nocturnal wanderers alike are furnished a home