Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

National Review, Feb 17, 1992 by Hugh Kenner

AT LAST COUNT, a sixtyish John Updike could list three dozen published books, most of them spun from his fictionist's imagination. In fiction he's indisputably of Master status, and a novel will absorb a Master for a year or more, a story for at least a month. Add time with four children, afternoons for golf, and lo, a life sweetly occupied.

In some space - time warp, though, Updike finds access to additional time.

The equivalent of two working years, he calculates, went to writing his 201 New Yorker reviews (of 369 books). And he instances a time toward the end of 1988 when, even while pondering a novel-to-be, he was working at assignments from ten or so publications, from Popular Mechanics ("a study of our national monuments from the engineering angle") clear down to The New Yorker ("an introduction to an album of covers"). Off Jobs, about the length of three novels, is but a selection from the spare-time work of but eight years, 1982-90.

One piece it includes is for Popular Mechanics, where we're told how Eero Saarinen's St. Louis Arch was put up, by technicians maneuvering atop what had already been completed (That's analogous to the way a novel gets written.) "Eighty-ton work platforms climbed the two legs of the arch on tracks of thirty-inch steel beams spaced twenty-four feet apart," and the fit of the final segment came within a 1/64 inch of perfection. He relishes that order of numeracy: not for him the coy wince of the Man of Feeling who, heh heh, could never balance a checkbook. For intelligence is after all unitary. That Updike can reward us with paragraphs about the engineering of an arch is perhaps less remarkable than the insight or Popular Mechanics in thinking to invite him.

Or here h is addressing an MIT audience, on the 25the anniversary of the Computer Science lab. Computers, he is hoping, will always be spared "The bloody, painful, and inconclusive mess of human experience":

Let them be, like the spoiled children of

men who have fought their way up from

the bottom, exempted from any need for

common sense, and let their first and

only emotion be bliss, the bliss we

glimpse in Bach fugues, in elegant mathematical

proofs, and in certain immortal

games of chess.

A tip of the hat, again, as much for MIT as for Updike.

Reviews of fiction, though, make up the bulk of Odd Jobs. An Assessment of five novels by Philip Roth occupies fifteen pages, and offers this gem: "Tirades, philippics, self-expositions: reading a Roth novel becomes like riding in an overheated club car, jostled this way and that by the clamorous, importunate crowd of talkers while glimpses of the outside word tantalizingly whip past the steamed-up windows. The train slackens momentum and clanks to a halt, and we press our forehead to the glass only to see that we already were in this station, an hour or two ago."

Or, here's the essence of Joyce Carol Oates: "Her fictional worlds exist to be consumed by her characters' passions ... Her plots suggests not architecture but could formations. beginning and ending in air; there is rarely a sentence that arrests a moment for its own cherishable sake, in a crystallization of language. All is flowing, shifting context. Her worlds refuse to enclose, to be pleasant. Prayers arise from them, but no praise."

And Franz Kafka, who "wrote in a Eurpe where islands of urban wealth, culture, and discontent were surrounded by a countrydside still, in its simplicity, apparently in possession of the secret of happiness, of harmony with the powers of earth and sky. Modernity has proceeded far enough ... to make us doubt that anyone really has this secret. Part of Kafka's strangeness, and part of his enduring appeal, was to suspect that everyone except himself had it."

Updike is wonderfully deft at that order of summation, and not only when he's dealing with fellow novelists, writers who create their worlds. A work of non-fiction, if sufficiently far from routine, can also summon up his generalizing powers. In 1990 a literate engineer named Henry Petroski published The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, and Updike found himself asking how the book filled 434 pages when its story, as his review demonstrates, can be summarized in 3. Well, "Mr. Petroski has an engineer's light touch upon his own pencil. He writes a relaxed, translucent, spun-glass kind of prose, with a not inconsiderable percentage of pure air between its twirled filaments."

That is not a brush-off; no, a detached account of the talent that educed a readable book from the story of the pencil. Consider: at a mere 200 pages, it "might appear to be merely informative. A book twice that size, though not as informative, is a feat, a prank: it has a certain mysterious majesty like that fondly remembered best-seller of yesteryear, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Such a swelling, looming, teasingly excessive book promises to lift us high from its quaintly specific base. With its striking blue jacket, which successfully imitates pencil sheen, and its unusual shape - tall, thick, but not wide - the artifact beckons.