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

partner, “You and I are through, buddy. The sight of you makes me puke. I was going to marry her, you know.” His upper lip did that chimp thing, as if to clean his teeth, in sheer aggression.

“No, I didn’t know. Did Phyllis know?”

This gave Ed pause. “I didn’t want to crowd her, when there was still a chance to patch it up with you. She adored you, you miserable piece of shit.”

Owen could have resented the way Ed was trying to steal his grief from him, there in front of the police, but he was thinking of a larger reality: the abyss that had yawned beside his childhood windows, the black lake of awful possibilities, had widened and risen to engulf his life. But he was still functioning, his brain still working, making more connections per split second than he could articulate, reorienting him in fresh circumstances, his perceptions quick and dry within the lake even as he drowned.

xiv. Village Wisdom

Village wisdom recommends that a building should not have thirteen stories, nor an histoire thirteen chapters. Its dictates tend to caution and conservatism: toss a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder, and knock wood after claiming good health; keep your opinion under your hat, and don’t stick your head above the crowd. Haskells Crossing is a good place for lying low. It is Julia who ventures out, to shop and to join women’s groups, to have massages and manicures, while Owen cowers in the house, tinkering with the Internet—a frustrating mass of peremptorily severed connections and blithely illiterate misinformation, offered on what it would be kind to call a junior-high-school level—and with oil painting. He has taken it up. He keeps trying to capture on canvas their view of Massachusetts Bay, his own yew and euonymus bushes in the foreground and in the middle ground scattered islands and tilting sailboats and in the distance a horizon where a few oil tankers ply their viscid, geopolitically critical wares; but the harder he stirs the oils on his palette to get the exact colors, the muddier and more muted they become. The atomic brilliance of reality, its reserved but implacable pop-up quiddity—this effect Nature keeps to itself. With the last of his little Boston consultancies disbanded, he and Julia live comfortably on the proceeds of the sellout of E-O Data that Ed arranged in 1978 with the infant Apple corporation of Cupertino, California. Owen’s pioneering work on graphical interfaces was rolled into the Atari-derived visuals of Apple’s early microcomputers and into the Alto interface employed in the triumphantly successful Macintosh of 1984. The shares which Ed Mervine had accepted in part payment partook of this triumph, and he presciently unloaded at the right time, and in a curt note advised his old partner to do the same. Owen, ever passive, took this wise advice; Apple’s early elegance glimmered out as the chilling shadow of Microsoft overcast the entire computer world. As a program, Windows was kludgy and a chip-power hog, but its hold on IBM and its clones could not be broken, any more than the inefficient, left-hand-favoring early typewriter keyboard could, once lodged in thousands of machines, be changed.

Owen arrived in his new village as a mysteriously comfortable stranger, who had filched a little fortune from the early stages of an increasingly less exotic business. He was superstitiously viewed as a kind of alchemist, but he knew that the alchemy of Babbage and Turing, Eckert and Mauchly and Von Neumann had long since become mere chemistry, a province of dronelike quantifiers and disagreeable smells. For a time he pecked away at his customized, power-boosted iMac, hoping to come upon another next thing, perhaps a form of browser program with a few corners ingeniously cut, while knowing in his heart that he was amusing himself; the room for individual invention had been squeezed from an egregiously “mature” and vulgarized field of exploitation, a practically infinite sprawl of e-mail, pornography, spam, half-baked data, digital photos and videos, pirated music—all the importunate demotic trash that in Owen’s youth had been mostly confined to the print medium, to bales of recyclable newspapers, magazines, catalogues, and flyers. So-called cyberspace was being stifled by the lowly appetites to which capitalism must cater. In engineering as in the arts, the dawn time, before all but a few are still asleep to the possibilities, is the time for leaps of creation. The computer’s engineering marvels, like those of the automobile earlier in the departed century, are buried in a landslide of common use: any bank teller can summon up currency quotations from Hong Kong, just as any auto driver can push on the pedal for more gas. And, just as platform countries have stolen the auto and textile industries from the American worker, so software is more and more outsourced to India, Russia, China, the Philippines. It is too sad. But progress is sad, change is sad, natural selection is very sad. Small wonder that Owen, in his old age, now that the last of his and Julia’s combined six children are out of the house, has taken up painting—its silence, its long association with the sacred, its odor of patiently purified essences and minerals.

The children, as children must, adjusted. Rachel and Thomas Larson, aged nine and seven at the wedding (a simple, bare-bones service in the Lower Falls Universalist Church), deferred to the four Mackenzies chronologically arrayed above them; they sheltered in their blood mother’s presence even as Julia put the bulk of her maternal effort—a heroic output of empathy, patience, and affection—into the traditionally suspect role of stepmother. Owen’s children, two of them in college and all four imbued with the stoic sophistication of a generation to whom family dysfunction is common TV fare, didn’t much blame their stepmother for what had befallen them. Only little Eve kept her distance, those first years. Then, as sexuality caught up with the child, she had no mature female to turn to but Julia,