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

you nerds don’t get, utterly don’t get,” he told Owen one night, “is those hideous machines of yours aren’t superhuman, they’re subhuman. Everything that made us human is going by the boards.”

“It’s just a device,” Owen said, determined to be amiable, feeling Alissa’s eyes insistently on him. “Like a hundred others—the steam engine, the automobile, the movie camera.”

“Yes, and they’ve all changed our tempo—speeded it up to the point that we don’t live at all.”

“What is it we do, then, Ian?” Phyllis asked. It was just the two of them to an informal dinner, there in the Morrisseys’ 1730 house in the older part of town. Unlike the Mackenzies, who at first had been their neighbors, the Morrisseys had remained loyal to the town center, near the Common. While Owen had been tinkering with the original DigitEyes, Ian had been up on his roof pointing the brick chimney; vigorous and optimistic, he had scraped and scorched the old lead housepaint from the clapboards, which then he had stained. Staining was supposedly the more authentic treatment, but it looked dark and ugly, temporary and cheap, to go with the low ceilings, the cracked plaster walls, and the shopworn folk-art oddments—duck decoys, jointed wooden dolls, a tin weathervane of a top-hatted man and bonneted woman—picked up at Connecticut roadside shops back when the couple, having left Manhattan, was freshly, acquisitively countrified. The whole house, even Ian’s neatly kept, fluorescent-lit studio, felt dusty; heart had gone out of their house, which made their invitations harder to refuse. The Mackenzie children did not like to come here to play, though the two Morrissey children were close in age to Gregory and Iris.

Phyllis’s careless soft voice drew attention to her. A third glass of wine, or a touch of intellectual stimulation, put an unaccustomed flush on her cheeks. Her distant beauty—that pallid head held high above the throngs in life’s mazy corridors—diminished the nervous, rounded attractions of Alissa, though Owen felt them curved around her discontent like the feathers of a plump bird nesting. Other people’s unhappiness, it occurred to him, had been his element since childhood; sensing it focused and invigorated him.

“We react,” Ian answered quickly. “We react to the damn machines, and go dead when they’re shut off.” The two couples had grown expert at these evenings together—the children upstairs with the mumble of television, the venerable neighborhood quieting down beyond the windows, which leapt into light when a passing car swung through the curve of Common Lane. Phyllis didn’t mind Ian; like her father, he had spent his life hunched over a two-dimensional task, and his darkly prophetic mood reminded her, perhaps, of dire adult palaver in Cambridge faculty circles. Sensing this, Ian played to her. “Are you aware,” he said, widening his appeal to include Owen and Alissa, “that as recently as our grandparents’ generation it was a common ability of people of any means to play a musical instrument, to carry a harmony part in group singing, and to be able to draw—to sketch out of doors and do at least watercolors? All those Victorian travellers could draw, and all the writers, not just Thackeray. Now not even the professional artists can draw. They slap up these huge abstractions that are an insult, a joke. The common man has a Brownie camera. Not even Brownies—that dates me. Brownies would take too much skill, they aren’t automatic enough.”

In agitation at hearing so much of her husband’s voice, Alissa crossed and recrossed her legs on the old velvet sofa, which had been recovered with sailcloth and decorated with several tattered crocheted shawls. “I remember my father,” she volunteered, her washed-out eyes moving from face to face uncertainly, “pacing off the distance with his old Kodak. That was how he photographed me and my brothers. The pictures came out surprisingly sharp. The little triangular viewfinder had broken off, too. He did it by guess. The snapshots fascinated me—there weren’t too many of them, the way there are now. He kept them in old candy boxes; when you took off the lids there was still the faint smell of chocolate.”

“See,” Ian said, “your old man, limited as he was, had mastered his tools. Nobody can use tools any more. They have to have everything done for them, by so-called experts, at twenty-five bucks an hour. And even so it’s all done badly. One of the few good things about this so-called revolution under way is that middle-class children are taking up the trades, carpentry and so on, in rebellion against their ham-handed white-collar parents.”

This tired tirade, Owen was aware, related to Ian’s own increasing difficulty getting commissions for his flashy illustrations, full of induced verve and unfinished margins; many framed samples, once reproduced in the Post and Collier’s and Redbook, surrounded them on the cracked plaster walls. Owen was enough of an art-lover to take Ian’s art lightly, but did not want to reveal, in defending his own field of endeavor, this disregard. “A computer is a tool,” he said. “Its moving parts are electronic impulses, but the same identical actions could be worked out mechanically—in fact, that’s what Babbage and Pascal before him did do, but the machines got too complex to be machined. Ian, why do you need to imagine some whole new demonic order? Do you feel the same about the pop-up toaster, as opposed to frying bread in a skillet?”

“O., dear, let Ian talk,” Phyllis said. “I want to hear more about how we’re all becoming subhuman.”

“Speaking of more, does anybody want another drink?” Alissa asked. She sounded hopeful of the offer being declined.

Ian sardonically promised, “One more Scotch-on-the-rocks, my dear, will greatly clarify my insight into the pitch-dark future.”

“A very weak bourbon-and-water, Alissa,” Phyllis conceded. “Can I help?”

“Just water for me,” said Owen, to reprimand Phyllis and to please Alissa, who was worried about her husband’s deterioration. Her glance at Owen suggested that it was they, sober, against the others. Her plump bare legs, as she uncurled and pushed