Sometimes you have the sense that, in a spirit of devilment and awe, Updike's commissioning editors at the New Yorker have conspired to test the limits of his curiosity. They never come close. A 400,000-word biography of Kierkegaard, translated from the Danish, affords Updike delighted insights into the “poetry of Adam Oehlenschlager and the intellectuality of King Christian VIII,” though he regrets it lacks proper examination of the influence of the great Dane on “Kafka and Karl Barth and Unamuno.”
For all his extravagant intellectual expeditions, though, he is at his effortless best the closer he gets to home. There are fragments of memoir scattered though these pages. Updike anyway has a habit of locating himself before he addresses the subject at hand; in passing, he examines his fear of water, begun when his father inadvertently dropped him in a pool, an event submerged in the “wavery warps” of memory; he confesses a lifelong poker addiction, indulged every fortnight in the same card school of Massachusetts neighbors since 1957; and he tells his life story through the cars he has owned. Of his first marriage: “We went our separate ways, she to a boxy Volvo station wagon, for Swedish stability, and I to a lime-colored Mustang convertible, for American pizzazz.”
The pick of the pieces are the half-dozen essays on writers that Updike has revered. Updike himself has been the subject of hero-worship, most memorably in Nicholson Baker's U and I, but he is not above some adulatory recollections of his own. The four related essays on EB White and James Thurber in particular act as a kind of Portrait of the Artist. White (most famous as the author of Charlotte's Web) introduced Updike to the New Yorker; Thurber, the magazine's resident wit, was his boyhood idol; their collaborative satire Is Sex Necessary?, first published in 1929, asked the question that Updike has spent a career answering. Every writer is a frustrated something; Updike is a frustrated cartoonist (there is an irony in the fact that someone with his facility for paragraph and essay has always envied one-liners); Thurber could both write and draw, and Updike has never stopped coveting that gift.
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