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

herself up from the sailcloth-covered sofa, excited him to thinking graphically; her convex thighs curved steeply inward where they met and transformed, without violating her fundamental homeomorphism, into a concavity delimiting another sort of space, beyond the sensitive V that he had, in one electric trespass, touched. It was late; cigarette smoke had pasted itself in eddying strips against the low ceiling, subdivided by boxed beams painted that custardy Williamsburg color.

“Capitalism,” Ian asserted, “asks only one thing of us: that we consume. The stupider we are, the better consumers we are, not just of that sliced pap called bread and of dishwasher detergents that kill fish in the river, but of canned entertainment. The less friction it makes going in our ears and eyes, the more we can take in and pay for. There is no more art in the old sense of something made, by hand, by an artist responsible only to his eye and his sense of beauty. Huddled over his drawing pad trying to get the exact shading for the, let’s say, the stones of Venice or a patch of wildflowers, he was processing the external into something human; he was understanding it, and we could understand it with him, empathizing with his process of discovery, step by step. Music lays this right out in the dimension of time: we travel with the composer as he solves the problems, the key-changes, the resolution. You don’t need to understand anything to watch television; they want you so stupid you keep staring at the commercials.”

Phyllis said, “I wonder if that’s why the young are so rebellious, because we’ve become so stupid. If that’s why they want to go back to Nature and blow up banks. They’re trying to break the shell of everybody’s stupidity.”

“Thanks, Alissa,” Owen said, as their hostess placed a pleasantly tall, heavy-bottomed glass of ice water, its exterior slick with the rivuleted sweat of the heat differential. Was it an accident that Alissa, bending over to place a coaster beneath his glass, showed him, in the catenary curve of the loose neck of her peasant blouse, her breasts? Their tops were brown but there was white skin, too, deeper in shadow, and a dark cavity between them where he could thrust a finger, or a tongue, or even socket his erect penis. At Heron Pond, Phyllis and Alissa both in two-piece bathing suits, Phyllis’s made an effect on her upright body of two bands of white, whereas Alissa’s two bikini pieces were all adhesive arcs, little tucked triangles secured with bows of tinted string.

Ian didn’t bother to respond to Phyllis, which offended Owen. Sitting in his tattered plaid wing chair, stained on its arms and where his head—greasily long-haired in artistic fashion—habitually leaned back, Ian clutched his fresh drink with his yellow fingers and spoke to Owen without deigning to turn his head; the two women on the sofa might as well not have been there. His goateed profile, stony-pale, snarled as if in a trance. “You nerds. You’re squeezing the juice out of life. To you we’re all just statistical constructs to be manipulated. I don’t blame Ed, he can’t help it, poor slob, being a nerd; if he wasn’t a nerd he wouldn’t be anything, a short-order cook at an all-night diner perhaps. But you, O. old boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way—you know something’s missing, and still you’ve signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses.”

“Actually,” Owen said, enjoying the other man’s meltdown into hostility, calculating that he had less and less reason to avoid fucking his wife, “a lot of our present work involves putting insurance records on tapes or, the newer thing, disks, and devising systems for hospitals, cutting down on paperwork. Or are hospitals and insurance companies part of Moloch’s armies? Ian, what’s missing began to go missing a long time ago, with Copernicus and Martin Luther, and you can’t blame technology for not bringing it back. Technology works with what, as Wittgenstein said, is the case. Some would say, incidentally, that the women’s magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It’s the Devil’s bargain, Ian—medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven. We’ve all signed on to the bargain, and a bunch of kids going up into Vermont and doing without flush toilets isn’t going to cancel the deal.” He wondered why he had become so heated; he didn’t want to believe this. He wanted to have technology and illusions, too: both were the ameliorative fruits of human imagination.

Phyllis loyally said, “Owen isn’t anti-art, he’s always going to museums. DigitEyes was all about that, sublimated.”

Owen flinched at the “was.” She was right: the program was becoming obsolete, and he was stuck in updating it, groping for the next thing. Tonight’s conversation, dragged out toward midnight by Ian’s pompous venting and Phyllis’s winsome egging him on, no longer interested him; he had satisfied himself that neither he nor Alissa owed Ian a thing. She, curled up on the sofa as if to melt into its cushions, was fighting sleep behind her flesh-colored glasses. Her lids looked pink and chafed, her thin smile patiently vengeful. In the car going home, Phyllis said, apropos of nothing, “She loathes him.”

Was she reading his mind, as it moved like a tracer point over Alissa’s remembered curves? He was startled, but believed that his wife was always right—a vault of wisdom he was in danger of totally forgetting the combination to, as he struck out on his own. “Really?” he said. “It’s just the same old Ian, rambling on. Why would she loathe him?”

“The same reason he loathes himself. Impotence.”

“Really?” The dark space his headlights probed seemed to deepen. It