Licked

Updike's aging protagonists boink on

by Richard C. Walls

LICKS OF LOVE. By John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, 360 pages, $25.

The first half of John Updike's latest offering comprises 12 recent short stories, most of them collected from the New Yorker, and all of them in a melancholic minor key. Once the poetic chronicler of illicit suburban couplings, Updike, at least in his short fiction, has become decidedly post-coital. The heat and upheaval of serial adultery -- "that taste of nihilism available to the common man" -- has been supplanted by the ambivalent afterglow of persistent memory. Updike's characters are growing older and, their thoughts crowded by a vivid past, ruminating on lost opportunities and bad choices with the kind of prideful masochism common among the young and the aged. Only in middle age, it seems, equipoised between beginning and end, does one have a shot at living more fully in the present.

Of course, it's not just sexual adventure that's receding on the horizon, it's life itself, specifically good old-fashioned American life as it existed outside the big cities, a more communal life both smothering and safe, like a too generous mother. In "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace," which revisits emotional territory covered in The Centaur, a young boy living in a small town in the '30s worries about the eccentric personality of his schoolteacher father less for any peer disdain it may arouse than for its perceived threat to the social order: "In this present day of strip malls and towns that are mere boundaries on a developer's map, it is hard to imagine the core of authority which existed then in small towns, at least in the view of a child -- the power of righteousness and enforcement that radiated from the miens of the central men." On the other hand, "the country ran on dimes and quarters" and though money might be scarce, material distractions were cheap.

More recently vanished worlds are recalled in stories like "Scenes from the Fifties" ("believe it or not, readers of the year 2000, the 1950s were a sweet time of self-seeking, brimming, like my [antiques] shop, with daily expectancy and quiet value") and "New York Girl," wherein a married man from Squaresville wistfully recalls a season boinking some boho chick in the early '60s. There were rich vistas open to young married males on the make, before strip malls came along and upset the natural order. Which may not be a fair observation, but one begins to think that way after reading six or so of these stories in a row and the accumulation of Updike's curmudgeonly delineation of modern . . . things . . . starts to seem like a signature tic of disgust in his loamy, mandarin style. Meanwhile, his attitude toward women remains slightly embarrassing, though God knows he tries, he really tries, paying them what used to be the compliment of awe and evincing a kind of scholarly interest in their complexity and deviousness.

The second half of the book is the novella Rabbit Remembered, and it goes a long way toward making up for the sad aftertaste of the short stories. Having finally killed off Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom after four novels, Updike now takes us into the lives of his survivors, with particular attention to his widow, Janice, his son, Nelson, and his illegitimate daughter, Annabelle. Janice, now 63, is remarried to the boorish, priapic (though pushing 70) Ronnie, an old friend/foe of Rabbit's; Nelson is 42 and has survived cocaine addiction to become a counselor for the generally dysfunctional; Annabelle, who's 39, shows up at Janice's door one day, a big and unwanted surprise. Janice recoils from Annabelle as a reminder of her late husband's infidelity, but Ronnie shows an unsavory interest, having once slept with Annabelle's mother (just as Rabbit once slept with Ronnie's first wife and Nelson's ex-wife once slept with Rabbit -- are you following this?).

At the heart of the story is the slow bond that develops between Nelson and Annabelle, the way he tries to give her a memory of the father she never knew while at the same time trying to bring himself closer to that distant figure. And though the short stories suggest a talent that's becoming cramped and cranky, Updike takes full advantage of this larger canvas, biding his time and fleshing out the characters' worlds (which consists largely of giving them jobs -- some of the most heartrending passages take place at Nelson's hellish workplace). And that odd Updike merriment bubbles up now and then in the form of bizarre images, as when Ronnie's huge penis is described as being "flat along the top as if you could rest a wineglass on it at half-mast." Instead of a rubber, he carries a coaster in his wallet. But, seriously, folks . . .

Seriously, Rabbit Remembered is a worthy coda to the long saga of Harry Angstrom, with the measure of remembrance and the possibility of a future delicately balanced. Time doesn't go only one way, and neither can its contents be limited. As Ronnie puts it, "It stretches. Like a condom."