The flight of the Spirit

Ian McEwan’s NYRB remembrance of Updike is the best obit I’ve read. He gets the dynamic of Updike right, locating the “seriousness and dark humor” in a “tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.” He understands the centrality of Updike’s Lutheranism and of the cinema. He gets the sex right: “It was there from the beginning, in his writing, that celebrated or infamus capacity for fastidious, clinical, visually intense, painfully and uproariously honest descriptions of men and women making love.”

He captures all this in a summary of a scene from Bech Noir when Jewish novelist Henry Bech, dressed in cape and mask and accompanied by his lover in a catsuit, climbs into the apartment of critic Orlando Cohen to murder Cohen for refusing “to grant Bch a place, even a minor place, in the canon.” Cohen has emphysema, and before Bech murders him, he gasps out his critique of Bech, which is that Bech didn’t understand America because he didn’t understand that America is fundamentally Protestant.

Cohen says, “The Holy Ghost . . . who the hell is that? Some pigeon, that’s all . . . but that God-awful faith . . . Bech . . . when it burns out . . . it leaves a dead spot. Love it or leave it . . . a dead spot. That’s where America is . . . in that dead spot.”

McEwan goes on: “the dead spot was the shadowy center of scores of novels and stories, in the freeways, malls, TV-addicted children, junk food, the boundless suburbs and their heartless intrigues and pursuit of ecstasy in restless, hopeful couplings, the messy divorces and their wounded children, the racial divide, the rackety politics filtered through TV screens, the national bafflement as manufacturing industries declined and the Japanese moved in with their cheaper cars.”

Walker Percy described himself as the canary in the mine shaft, and Updike had a similar sensitivity to the loss of breath, of air, of Spirit, that dead spot where we all now live.