Familiar tunes John Updike’s many randy ways BY J.L. JOHNSON
	Villages By John Updike. Knopf, 336 pages, $25.

In the July 5 New Yorker, there appeared the short story "Elsie by Starlight," which in its few pages caught sharply the thrill and the terror of first sex, the profound awe of having one’s core self "clumsily yet unstoppably" mapped by another. The initiate is Owen Mackenzie, a college freshman in the 1950s who goes deep into deserted woods with his high-school girlfriend one night but cuts short their interlude, spooked by a feeling of danger and trespass. In quick, appealing strokes, the story sketches Owen’s character as an innocent, susceptible to his own tenderness with a girl he ultimately doesn’t love and whom he will leave a virgin: "Her body like that of a slithering cool flexible fish in his arms had been a revelation, but this had been revelation enough for one night."

Readers beguiled by the sure-footed, sexy "Elsie by Starlight" may feel cheated upon seeing it in full context, as a chapter in John Updike’s new novel, Villages. The lush language is the same, the longer story line similarly sparked with eroticism. But as the scope widens to take in all seven decades of Owen Mackenzie’s life, the thoughtful if excitable boy seen through the peephole of the short story emerges as a full-blown sexual narcissist so repellent, one wonders whether Updike has parody in mind.

Humor is one possibility, yes: Villages is peopled with rich ninnies and fabulously randy housewives, and Owen himself verges on holy fool in suggesting God so charmed his life that people will die at times convenient to him. But our protagonist is so confounded earnest in all things relating to his penis (he imagines the sum of his life as "a sheet of inky-blue tissue paper held up to a light, so the holes pricked in it shine: these stars are the women who let him fuck them"), he invites us to take him seriously too. Which means Updike in his 21st novel is hawking straight-faced yet another tale of a middle-class heterosexual white man obsessed with sex and death.

The "villages" of the title are the stages on which Owen’s life plays out. The first is Willow, an Eastern Pennsylvania industrial town where only-child Owen grows up in a household leaking parental tension. At the other end is Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts, the wealthy enclave Owen has chosen for his twilight years. In between — and taking up the most psychic real estate — is Middle Falls, Connecticut, a magnificent example of the buzzing hives of glass that are small-town New England.

After a chaste ’50s courtship of fellow MIT student Phyllis, Owen brings his young family to Middle Falls to set up a computer consultancy and to perfect DigitEyes, an interface he believes will make the critical leap away from punched tape and code-language command lines. He is young, he is ambitious, he is happy in their new home. "On the sidewalks of Middle Falls he enjoyed a buoying sense of being known, of being upheld by watching eyes . . . not exactly a celebrity but somebody, in the way that small enough towns make everybody somebody."

For a man who hungers to be seen, attention is good, flirtation is better, and sex — offering the intense regard that only another naked person can give — is best of all. As his wife and four children recede into the distance, Owen embarks on a journey of self-revelation that the women of Middle Falls are happy to abet. "It’s all a matter, isn’t it, of being known," one of his lovers tells him. "You want to be known better than you know yourself."

The story arc is slight. Owen ripens but never matures; he receives an education but never wisdom. After some years of this, he falls in love with a preacher’s wife, seizing "his chance to settle safely into married concupiscence and obedience." And so it is at the opening and closing of Villages that we find Owen in Haskells Crossing, henpecked but secure, holding the memories of his youth as a talisman against death — that ultimate anti-knowing, the obliteration of self.

Updike’s greatest gift is, one can argue, to reframe the details of ordinary life so that we see them new. He writes of husbands and wives as "biform creatures, semi-transparent so that each could be seen through the other, imperfectly." When he looks at a wealthy matriarch, he envisions "money stoppered by the octogenarian’s living body, like tons of wheat waiting to pour forth from a prairie grain elevator’s unloading chute."

His eye is still achingly sharp, and perhaps that is the pleasure of reading Villages: seeing the flash of poetry in the everyday. But the talent of our tour guide can’t disguise the fact that we’ve been over this novel’s terrain before, and one can’t help wishing that — as in his comic "Bech" books and in the monumental variety of his short stories — Updike would strike out in new directions.