Fiction Friday: John Updike

Today is the first in what will hopefully become a weekly series: Fiction Friday. I’ve alway been a voracious reader, spending more time in fiction as a teenager than in the books I was supposed to be reading for school (and it showed in my grades). Then in my early twenties I “got serious” about my faith and swore-off fiction forever, deeming it to be a childish escape and a waste of time.

Eventually I learned that non-fiction can be just as escapist, and somewhere in-or-around my 30th year a close friend re-introduced me to the wonders of fiction. “You’re just not reading the right stuff,” he said, tossing me Pynchon, Delillo, Saunders, and Borges. Those authors captured by imagination and now, it seems, the older I get the more I appreciate story and myth as far better handmaidens of truth than the slipp’ry cold stuff we usually call “facts.” Actually, the more I see biblical literature as “mere” story and myth, the more it seems to change my life.

Enough of the introduction. On to our first spotlight author.

John Updike passed away one year ago and was best known for his Rabbit series. He is generally considered one of the greatest American writers of all time, and, in my opinion, for good reason. His prose is lyrical, his psychological insights piercingly true, and his settings are earthy and accessible. Best of all, he always seems to know where he’s going. He’s the best of guides.

In his short story Pigeon Feathers John Updike uses a mature narrator’s voice to give us a peek into the crisis of faith being experienced by the young adolescent main character, David. Having returned to the childhood home of his mother (much to the consternation of his father), the pastoral expansiveness of their new agricultural community serves a fitting panorama to the exploding emotional vistas in David’s own heart and mind.

Everyone in David’s house seems to go about their own business – his mother tasks about house blissfully with Grandma hanging annoyingly on her hip, while his father, utterly disconcerted by the earthy, pagan landscape, runs endless errands to the city, finding a sophisticated respite from the “unintelligent” and backward farmers in their new hometown. David is busy too, lamenting the loss of innocent pleasures; familiarity, science-fiction, and comfortable furniture, all indiscriminately stowed away under heavy tarps in the barn.

Treading in this restlessness, David happens upon an historical work by H.G. Wells, in which he reads a passage wherein the author cavalierly dismisses the divinity of Christ as the superstitious power-making of an ambitious early Church. (Wells, apparently was the Dan Brown of his day!) Severely shaken, David seeks to re-appropriate the misplaced furniture in his mind, pressing doggedly toward a quest for truth but losing many of his illusions along the way about the world, the church, and even his own family. Just when we think David might in fact lose everything he cherishes most, including his faith, he is brought to peace in an act of violence, reborn in a moment of death played out in the very barn stuffed full of his own dusty artifacts.

Updike makes liberal, yet masterful use of simile and metaphor to communicate the subtle and complex cues of external human interactions and internal rationalizations, and paints strikingly vivid metaphors of the human psyche: discarded old furniture, dusty books, a darkened barn. Updike is especially skilled at invoking the atmosphere of death without clumsily announcing its presence – in a fathers habitual saying, a grandmothers hooked claw, the irreverent memory of a long-dead grandfather, and the lifeless soil itself, stripped of life by agro-chemicals and turned hard as slate. We sense with some horror that this thread is pulling David toward a kind of spiritual death – and David is horrified too – but the surprise is how death itself becomes the surprising catalyst for the emergence of new life in a simple observation about pigeon feathers. Indeed, if it weren’t for David’s transformation death would be salvation in this story, but through David we discover that real salvation is found in the dogged search for eternity.

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