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

had her tongue, or as if the basic imprecision of speech bothered her, whereas Julia in their very first meeting at the hospital fund-drive celebration dazzled him with the excellence of her pronunciation and the glittering completeness of her sentences. Talking for her, as for her husband, was a kind of delight, a public self-pleasuring, and one of Owen’s puzzlements concerned why a pair so well-matched had allowed itself to be split up. But ideality becomes by itself, in a couple, a reason for dissatisfaction and rebellion. Americans need to experience room for improvement, for progress.

Looking back, he is touched by how completely his two wives delivered what he asked. Phyllis had hoisted him up into Cambridge and the snob life of the mind, and Julia into Haskells Crossing and the life of bourgeois repose. If both lives were less than complete—less than his mother, who exaggerated his capacities, would have wished for him—then life itself is incomplete, a hasty approximation. It is a rough rehearsal, not a finished production.

The world tends to give us what we want, but what we receive will partake of the world’s imperfection.

He remembers his life in Middle Falls nostalgically, as a magical exploration of his male nature, but he forgets the seedy underside—the fear of discovery, the squeezed brevity of the trysts, the guilt that gnawed his innards into gastritis, the messy aftermaths. With Faye there had been legal threats and with Alissa a pregnancy. Once he and Alissa had tried meeting at the Whitefield’s Rock preserve, in the woods where he and Faye had gone that wondrous first time, and midsummer mosquitoes feasted on her exposed skin. She stood above him in forest concealment as he tugged down her underpants; her lovely plump legs became quickly hairy with the frantic bloodsucking little creatures. Out of mercy, he said after a minute, “Let’s get out of here.” He forgets more and more but still remembers trying to brush away the mosquitoes from her thighs as his mistress gazed down at him uncertainly, looking to him for leadership and sexual stimulation, for a sheltered site where they could be themselves.

The children are gone now but Julia and Owen live with another presence in the house, their approaching deaths. And before that, if they are unlucky, Alzheimer’s with its idiotic life-in-death. They are both forgetful, she of errands she means to run and he of names, especially of their friends in Haskells Crossing and Haven-by-the-Sea. Names planted early in the brain seem to last; a curling, brittle photo of the Willow second grade awakens names row by row, without a gap, whereas yesterday’s golf companion, met on the street, draws a blank, although Owen can picture his swing—a vulturous hunch, a spectacular hook—perfectly. Former President Reagan hangs heavily over the infant millennium: this foggy-voiced actor, this handsome snake-oil salesman who persuaded the poor to vote with the rich, as if indeed they were rich, has become a haze of pure existence, unencumbered by any memory of his venturesome life or even by his faithful wife’s name, while his own name, thanks to his grateful party, is attached to the capital’s airport and a huge downtown building of appropriately vague purpose. He haunts the national village; he warns us of what, even with salubrious amounts of brush-cutting and horseback-riding and plenty of sleep, can happen. In Pennsylvania they used to speak of old people “going back”—reverting, that is, to infancy. Owen and Julia are already turned in that direction, talking in baby syllables, touching each other as if for orientation in the dark, squabbling like mated toucans in a tropical jungle and then flying away in perfect forgetful unison.

Owen’s old question—why that anonymous, paradigmatic woman had allowed herself to pose for the obscene depiction on the back of the playground-equipment shed—is still imperfectly answered. The question perhaps belongs to the unscientific order that deserves no answer, such as Why does anything exist? and What is gravity? Julia takes a jarringly hard-eyed view: women are the world’s slaves and in the end must do whatever men demand. As Alissa pointed out, the question Why do men fuck? is never asked. The question Why do women? perhaps arose in Owen’s mind from a childish over-estimation of the distance between women and men. He had no sisters; his mother’s heat frightened him; the macadam playground surrounding the Willow Elementary School had been gender-segregated by a broad central sidewalk. Decades later, Owen read that, in an experiment on white mice gender-segregated by an electric fence, the males back off at the first severe shock whereas the females continue to charge the fence until all are electrocuted.

Women’s natures are very large, he early sensed, to seek sex amid the world’s perils, in the face of so many wise societal discouragements. The force that parts their legs overrules modesty and prudence and common sense. Women fuck, his provisional conclusion was, because, like men, they are trapped in a biological universe where the species that do not propagate disappear; the traits the survivors harbor—lustiness, speed, canniness, camouflage—are soaked in these disappearances, these multitudinous deaths. Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevices. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are splendid, and the naked bodies we were given in the bloody moment of birth hold all the answers that another, the other, desires, now and forever.

At three in the morning, writhing on the wrinkled sheets, unable to find the door to healing self-forgetfulness, as close to his death as Grampy was on Mifflin Avenue but a more skeptical and less frequent reader of the Bible, Owen sees as if looking down into a suddenly illumined well that his charmed life has been a long torment of fear, desire, ambition, and guilt. Picturing himself in Middle Falls, he cannot imagine what drove him