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

into so many hazardous passes and contorted positions: he was a puppet whose strings old age has snipped. Even his attempts at masturbation now fizzle; in his mind’s eye he runs the images of those moist, knowing engulfments, those grotesque postures of submission, but, just when he almost has it, has it in hand, the temperature or edge or whatever it is unexpectedly slithers away. The triggering mix of brute mechanics and sentimental illusion dissipates. The secret flees. The system crashes. The workable parameters, once so broad there was ample room for fatigue and ambivalence, draw in. At the far extreme of his pilgrimage, the self-induced orgasms of early adolescence recede. None since have been so intense, so absolute an escape. Similarly, he looks at the contents, the well-made furniture and lustrous crockery, of his present excellent white seaside house and cannot conjure upon them the Christmas gleam, the excited metaphysical urgency, that the shabby homely things in his grandfather’s house—the brass candlesticks and embroidered table runners, the paltry few books and toys and vases—had possessed in the pale December window-light.

What remains to him are moments of tender regard, in nakedness or on the way to it. Vanessa always achieved orgasm, but there was something brisk, even dismissive, in her way of seizing it, as opposed to Alissa’s whimpering, finger-sucking dissolution in cascading ripples of sensation that delivered her to what always seemed a fresh surprise. Dear Faye, apparently, flirted on the edge, but with an infectious, innocent gaiety that made her easy to love. Karen had been the least trouble; to her in her generation it had been no big deal, like a coffee break or a spasm of exercise after sitting too long on an airplane. No, this is not fair. She, too, and Jacqueline and Antoinette and Mirabella, especially Mirabella with her spun-sugar hair, brought transcendent value to the act, the supreme interaction. People must be romantic or fail to lift themselves above the deadpan copulation of sheep and squirrels. Phyllis’s impatient permission, in that Cape Cod cabin smelling of salt air and pine sap—Let’s just do it—set an unfortunate grudging tone, perhaps, but did let him enter a realm wherein his own mysterious existence needed no explaining. Things come, for the instant, clear. Owen’s past is like a sheet of inky-blue tissue paper held up to a light, so the holes pricked in it shine: these stars are the women who let him fuck them.

It was a celibate villager who wrote, “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.” Such a surface order makes possible human combinations and moments of tender regard. It is a mad thing, to be alive. Villages exist to moderate this madness—to hide it from children, to bottle it for private use, to smooth its imperatives into habits, to protect us from the darkness without and the darkness within.

Also by John Updike

POEMS

The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

NOVELS

The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

SHORT STORIES

The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)

PLAY

MEMOIRS

Buchanan Dying

(1974)

Self-Consciousness

(1989)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.