New Voice

 Switching on the internet last Satuday morning I was delighted to see Martin Amis reviewing John Updike’s final collection of stories on The Guardian website.  Now, Amis is no ordinary, jobbing critic, and this piece of work did not disappoint.  What followed was a thorough, engaged and beautifully attentive delineation of the frequent lapses in Updike’s prose.   

In his foreward to The War Against Cliché, Amis had this to say about the practice of writing about books: 

‘You proceed by quotation.  Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence.  Or semi-hard evidence.’ 

His Guardian piece is littered with Updike’s sentences as Amis draws attention to the ‘blizzard of false quantities…those rhymes and chimes and inadvertent repetitions, those toe-stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work’. 

Amis in no way attempts to denigrate his subject’s position at, or very near the pinnacle of post-war American literature, that is to say of English literature.  He clearly loves Updike and holds him in the highest of esteem, describing his prose as ‘that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-loving.’
Copious instances of the ‘wantonly careless prose’ found by Amis throughout this collection ensue.  These stories, excepting the concluding few, have been, he feels, ‘denuded of a vibrant verbal surface’, rendering them ‘products of nothing more than professional habit.’ 

Peter Kemp’s review of the same collection was itself an exercise in going through the motions of perfunctory professionalism.  Kemp must have had a particularly sweaty and worrisome Saturday, if he’d had the good sense to read Amis’s piece.  Or perhaps he just doesn’t care.  He certainly doesn’t care as much.   

Amis obviously read and re-read Updike’s sentences (and mentions doing so), enabling such a close, detailed analysis and thus giving the likes of me, and Peter Kemp a lot to learn.  The abundant quotation in The Guardian also makes this clear.  Kemp quotes only three times from the stories, engaging the rest of the time in mindless obsequiousness and flippant hyperbole.  In the process he does nothing to respect Updike’s standing, or either of their reputations.   

The absurdity of his comments can be seen if we avoid the short plot summaries and thematic discussions with which he proceeds, and turn instead to the quotations used by Amis, placing them alongside Kemp’s most wanton claims. 

Kemp: ‘his genius can be seen on peak form’
Updike: ‘ants make mounds like coffee grounds’ 

Kemp: ‘ravishing aplomb’
Updike: ‘except for her bust, abruptly outthrust’ 

Kemp: ‘He has never used it [his pen] to better effect than in My Father’s Tears’
Updike: ‘Lee’s way of getting away from her’
              ‘his rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women’ 

Kemp; ‘rich in masterstrokes of social, psychological and emotional nuance’
Updike; ‘He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realised, his hand warm in                               
               mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I.’
Kemp: ‘a blaze of brilliance’
Updike: ‘polished bright by sliding anthracite’ 

As Amis says, these are ‘painful quotes’ but not half as soul-destroying as reading a glowing review which, when seen in the light of the previous day’s picking through the rubble, does no favours to its subjest’s memory.  In fact, it’s downright disrespectful.  Kemp’s eyes may have been half open as he set about his journalistic task, but his ears certainly weren’t.   

Strangely enough, the negative judgement, through its care and attention, serves to sustain Updike’s rightful position as, in Amis’s words, ‘perhaps the greatest virtouso stylist since Nabokov-who, inn his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtouso stylist since Joyce’. 

Those writers cared greatly for the sonority of their sentences and so Amis is vindicated in drawing attention to those occasions where Updike slips.  For the love of literature, Amis tells the truth, and it’s a far cry from The Sunday Times’s claim that Updike has ‘saved the best for last’.