Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

“Read it for yourself.”

“I read the Globe.”

“How very stupid of you, Owen. There’s nothing in it but rapes in Medford and murders in Dorchester.”

“Well, unlike the sanctimonious fucking Times, the Globe doesn’t claim to know what news is fit to print.” In his nervousness, he goes to the breadbox in its deep drawer and extricates a bag of Newman’s Own Traditional Thin Pretzels, which smell more baked than less moral brands, and bites one. The first bite is the best. Paul Newman is white-haired too, posing with his daughter Nell on the cellophane bag. Owen can remember him in Hud, as youthful and dangerous and semi-sleepy as the late James Dean.

Julia cries in something close to agony, “Eat over the sink! The floor gets filthy and the cleaning ladies were just here!”

These are a pair of freshly immigrant Brazilians, not sisters but identically shaped, with broad, bustling behinds. Sometimes they form a trio, the third being slimmer, with butternut skin and huge chocolate eyes and no English.

“Oh, you’re such a slob!” his wife exclaims. “Your mother didn’t teach you anything!”

Owen might argue this, if Julia were in a better temper. His mother taught him a great deal, though it is hard, now toward the end of his life, to say what. Her wisdom, mostly wordless, was fitted to life in Willow—how to survive there, who to obey and who to avoid, how to generate a confidence, a sense of being precious, that would arm him for a future elsewhere. She imparted little about hair-combing, and manners in general; Owen accordingly takes such niceties lightly. He is a slob, yet squeamish. He does not like eating over the sink; it makes him feel like a dog at his bowl. He wants to eat as he did when a child, wandering through his grandfather’s house with a stalk of celery or a bar of peanut brittle in blissful ignorance of any falling crumbs. Mealtimes there tended to be stressful: Grammy, as her Parkinson’s worsened, had a way of choking at the table, and his mother could be having a red-faced temper sulk, or his father, his mournful accountant’s face looking drained of blood, could be adding up in his head how much these many mouths to feed were costing him. Owen found that food eaten in solitude, on the run, in odd corners, tasted best. He happily remembers faithfully consuming a six-cent Tastycake while walking back to school after lunch and, when he was older, walking around downtown Alton cracking peanuts from a paper bag still warm from the roasting.

He does not blame his wife for scolding him, for bursting forth. She needs him to be perfect, or else she has made a lifelong mistake. Each has bought the other dearly, in coin not all theirs. Her repugnance, when she expresses it, he accepts as evidence of her wanting him to measure up to the highest standards. She needs him to be a perfect husband, to justify herself. She does not want to hear about his dream-party back in Middle Falls, with the mischievous women dressed up in colorful porcelain carapaces.

His marriage with Phyllis took a wound, perhaps, in the two years when he was in the post–Korean War Army, enjoying the company of the rapidly obsolescing giant computers devoted, with their skimpy memories and miles of telephone-circuitry wiring, to the calculation of missile trajectories and, linked up with radar, the primitive beginnings of air-traffic control. She gave birth without him, in Mt. Auburn Hospital, to eight-pound Gregory while Owen was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. Seven-pound Iris came after Phyllis had joined him in Germany, in military housing outside Frankfurt. Unfortunately, that week, toward the end of his tour, Owen was troubleshooting at a secret missile site in Turkey, and again missed her birth travail.

By then the Russians had long-range aircraft capable of bringing a nuclear bomb across the North Pole, and coördinated air defense had achieved high priority and top-secret status. Whirlwind had been brought up to real-time speed with the installation of magnetic-core memory, and its prototype, the basic hardware of his education at MIT, had become the manufactured IBM AN/FSQ-7, installed at Direction Centers across the nation as part of SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Holding forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes and weighing two hundred fifty tons and housed in four-story concrete eyesores, these electronic dinosaurs were fed data from a global network of sources maintained by the U.S. Armed Forces; Owen, on loan to the Air Force, became one of hundreds of technologically trained servicemen stationed at blinking cathode-ray tubes, deciphering blips. Mistaken blips and misfiring input could be catastrophic in the delicately poised surveillance game; but he was struck, touched even, by the basic reliability of the machines, unwieldy though they retrospectively seemed after chip miniaturization had reduced their bulk, and program languages had made them easier conversational partners. There were still many switches to throw, and blinking lights on the consoles. Owen began to take a hand in the refinement and invention of programs—tedious lines of assembly code, which in the event of error had to be examined character by character, in printed memory dumps that strained the eyes and addled the mind. He showed competence enough to be invited to extend his hitch, with officer rank, and thereby to help hold at bay the dogged Soviets, who were lagging far behind in computer science.

But Phyllis hated military life, both the unpacificist idea of it and the khaki-drab daily reality. “The lowest common denominator rules,” she said. “And the wives—so vulgar, so obsessed with their little nests, with sex, which is all they have to offer.” Owen didn’t think this was such a meagre thing to offer, but said nothing. He respected his wife’s opinions. When he talked of reupping, it was to tease a reaction out of her; her pale cheeks flushed pink as her arguments became earnest. Without ever seeming to study him, she could dip