The American Century: Literature since 1945 583creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him,” Barth observes
here. “He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.” All
Updike’s major characters inhabit this boundary between heaven and earth, between
the intensity of life and the inevitability of death, between dreams of freedom and
the comforts of a compromised, suburban environment. “I feel to be a person is to
be in a situation of tension,” Updike once explained. “A truly adjusted person is not
a person at all.” So characters like George Caldwell (The Centaur), Harry Angstrom
(in the four novels, Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981),
Rabbit at Rest (1990) and recalled in the novella Rabbit Remembered (2001)), Piet
Hanoma (Couples (1968)), Henry Bech (Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1982)),
Roger Lambert (Roger’s Version (1986)), Clarence Wilmot, his son Ted, granddaugh-
ter Esther, and great-grandson Clark (In the Beauty of Lilies (1996)), and even the
Muslim fundamentalist Ahmad in Terrorist (2006) all perform and pursue their
maladjustments in what is called, in Couples, “a universe of timing”: enacting the
beauty, and the terror, of their own duality. So, in The Centaur, George Caldwell,
an aging schoolteacher, is having to come to terms with his own decline and immi-
nent death. “I’m a walking junk-heap,” he declares, announcing an obsession with
waste, human and universal, that runs through Updike’s fiction. In Couples, for
instance, Piet Hanoma similarly suffers from a “dizzying impression of waste” and a
“sense of unconnection among phenomena and of feeling.” As a teacher of evolu-
tion, Caldwell can reflect on a time “when consciousness was a mere pollen drifting
in darkness” and on his own annihilation: from nothing and to nothing. His mind is
preoccupied with the wasting of nature. “I hate Nature. It reminds me of death,”
he insists bitterly. All things – cars, houses, people, landscapes – fall apart, revert to
zero. “Things never fail to fail,” Caldwell tells himself.
Against this entropic vision, this dread of the void, is set the possibility of love.
“A man in love ceases to fear death,” Updike observed in one of his essays. “Our fun-
damental anxiety is that we do not exist – or will cease to exist. Only in being loved
do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly
assigns itself.” There is also what Updike has called the “brainless celebration of the
fact of existence”: like the carnival celebrations that conclude his first novel,
The Poorhouse Fair (1959). And there are the comforts of the customary, routine and
structure. Piet Hanoma in Couples, for instance, comes from a family of builders and
is a dedicated carpenter. Grappling with materials helps him to fend off a sense of
the void. “He needed to touch a tool. Grab the earth,” the reader is told. “All houses,
all things that endured, pleased Piet”; they give him a self-stabilizing pragmatism,
a feeling of “space secured.” And yet such is the duality, the constant vacillation of
Updike’s characters, they can also feel like a prison some times. The void is terrifying
but maybe liberating; the structures of houses, the suburbs, suburban routine, may
be comforting but they can also be claustrophobic. And Updike always returns to the
fundamental intimation that structures waste away too, they are part of “the world’s
downward skid.” “I think books should have secrets, like people do,” Updike has said.
And the secret his own books disclose is the imminence of the void, the dread fear
of death and the dim possibility of grace: another dimension that gives depth andGGray_c05.indd 583ray_c 05 .indd 583 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM