Learning anew: the playfulness of Updike.

I recently (well, a couple of weeks ago) Updike’s book of poetry Verse. It is two books of poetry combined into one, most of which was written and published before he began his string of commercially successful novels.

One of the facets of Updike’s writing that I’ve always admired is his unflinching adherence to ugliness, and his belief that within ugliness, we can find beauty. These themes run through his Rabbit series, color his short stories, and add to his most common main character: an egotistical, sexually-driven man. Death, divorce, drug use, and despair; these are not pretty items but they are true items.

Yet in his poetry, Updike portrays a vastly different personality. These poems are, in a word, fun. Spanning from an alphabet of poems—one poem per letter, each for one item starting with said letter—to a touching poem written to his daughter, who, like him, was born in March. And yet the biting wit, the sly cleverness of Updike remains. It shows concisely and cleverly in the following poem:

Xyster

“An instrument for scraping bones”
Defines the knife.
The word is rarely used—but why?
What else is life?

Beyond playful—or cynical—witticisms, though, Updike shows a patience for the act of crafting poetry. In the poem, “Yardstick” he writes five lines, each split into three sections—and each section containing exactly twelve characters. Equate the characters to inches, of course, and the poem is five yardsticks stacked on one another.

Updike pulls from headlines, from funny turns of phrase he hears, and from antiquated sayings that appear comically poetic to a contemporary ear. It reads more like Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstine than Updike, but even at his most lighthearted, Updike shows the same mastery of the English language that enabled him to pen some of the best American novels I have ever read.

50 Books in 2010: Book Two, Atonement by McEwan

I recently finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, a gift from a professor (many thanks, Dr. Allison), given with the promise that (is it ever not true?) the book was much better than the movie. I haven’t seen the movie, and having read its better origin, I am none too enticed to see it.

I enjoyed the book—I read it rapaciously, in two days time (and without staying up until the quietest hours to do so), but I have to admit that the first book—it is split into three books—was by far my favorite, and the latter two thirds were a bit disappointing.

Before going any further, it should be said that McEwan is a terrifically talented writer. He turned phrases that made me want to vomit, they were so beautiful. (Is that professional jealous? Perhaps. Intimidation? Most certainly.) His phrasing, his manner of painting a setting, and his characterization were all immensely enjoyable.

That being said, the book weighed uneven to me. The first third, in my reading of it, focused on a few simple tasks: introducing the characters, the setting, and developing the characters as a means to slowly move the plot. The language sprawled from chapter to chapter, and worked to add its depth within the context of the everyday. It was, simply, life. The latter portion focused more on events, it seemed, then characters, whose characterization seemed fairly static once Book II started. It focuses on World War II, a soldier’s experience and a nurse’s experience, and tries to encapsulate the horror of war, the tension of the times, the shame of retreat—and all within the framework it set in Book I. Certainly a daunting task, and one that is so major that the everyday realism of the characters was lost in the scope of major events. It was like the book started to be about people and life, and ended about events.

Perhaps it is just personal bias, but I have long felt that the most important parts of literature are the language and the characters. If the language paints a clear picture and the characters are real, and elicit emotion (positive or negative, or most likely positive and negative) I think the plot will come.

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m certainly no expert, and this blog is the closest I have come so far to publication, but that’s the part that I enjoyed the most, and the part I enjoy creating the most. We’ll see where it takes me.

Probably worth saying, too, as a disclaimer: For those who haven’t read it or seen the movie, Atonement is not a book for kids. Maybe not high schoolers either.