Fiction: Mention of John Updike is sufficient for readers to either dismiss him as irrelevant or praise him to the skies and beyond. I belong to the latter camp, and believe Updike, line for line, image for image, is one of the finest, most sensuous writers to have emerged anywhere, at any time. His genius is his feel for language; his art is his prose, his stories are insightful perceptions, writes Eileen Battersby.
True he has committed the most cardinal of errors: he writes far too much. Only Joyce Carol Oates can surpass his hyperactivity. Alongside the squadron of books - of which this new novel is volume number 54 - there is his journalism on a multitude of subjects, including years of regular reviewing. Updike's great gift is also his curse: he is a natural writer for whom writing is as natural as breathing .
That said, Updike has never written about war. And another of the great themes, at least for US writers, that of the difficulties of being Jewish, does not apply to him. Europe holds no ghosts for him. He is pure WASP and his parodic Jewish novelist, Harry Bech, is a comic invention. No war, no religious angst - that leaves sex, which Updike has made his chosen territory. He is also decidedly unpretentious. Such facts may explain why some critics and readers dismiss him as a middlebrow.
But Updike is far more than the chronicler of middle-class adultery, US style. His understanding of what it means to be human and alive is without equal, and if it appears that religion has never preoccupied him, God certainly does. Many Updike characters experience the shudder of awareness that comes from knowing, and fearing, the almighty's control of destiny.
Seek My Face is Updike's 20th novel, familiar and yet not quite like any of its predecessors. On the surface it is a story drawing on the modern art scene in the US. It does not require too much expertise to identify Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol as templates for two of the major characters. The narrative develops in the form of an interview situation. The central character is Hope Chafetz, an artist in her own right, whose place in contemporary art history is further consolidated by her having been married to two major artists.
Hope is now old and widowed, living alone in Vermont. A young woman arrives at the house to interview her. Through the course of a long conversation, Hope tells her story, with some prompting from Kathryn, the interviewer, who is tense but pedantically well-prepared. At first, this two-hander, sustained by questions and answers, may seem just too easy for Updike. Though wary of the tape recorder on the table, Hope nonetheless speaks at length; her memory is good, her delivery is lively and her attitude is candid. There is little evasion. If a pause occurs, the interviewer is there to fill the gap.
Initially there is too much about the larger-than-life Zack, the standard wild- guy artist with whom Hope passes her youth and first snatches at fame. Yet Updike knows all the tricks and, while he never climbs into Hope's head, he allows us to listen as she answers the questions, making observations of her own and, of course, reliving the memories nudged back to life during the course of the interview. Updike catches the blunt awkwardness of the tenacious interviewer.
The two women battle on. Hope seems unusually generous with her time as well as the facts of her life. But it soon becomes clear why. Hope is revisiting her life. Of far more interest than the contrasting mad genius husbands, Zack and Guy, and other vividly described scenes from the past, are Hope's perceptions of the present. She is both repelled and fascinated by how old she has become. In many ways this novel reads as a meditation on age and on the way random events and moments, the various layers of experience and incident, become a life and, in time, a personal history.
Hope is fascinated by the youth of her interviewer, as well as her anger and vulnerability. For all the thrusts and parries, the hits scored by an appalling truth, their conversation becomes part game, part counselling session, part cross-examination. Hope's response to the edgy young woman proves the novel's muted triumph.
As ever with Updike, his genius for physical description dominates. Skin, its texture, temperature and colour, the shape of an ear, a hand resting on the arm of a chair - all are brilliantly described. Seek My Face could as easily be called "Seek My Heart" (or soul). Hope convinces because she is an ordinary, greedy, flawed, hopeful human being. It is not her colourful experiences that have made her; the important elements were her mistakes, as well as the small hurts she absorbed along the way. She is a character capable of saying: "Relationships are so sad, aren't they?"
Less than halfway through the novel - and the interview, which spans the entire day that comprises the narrative - Hope rises slowly to her feet and sees her own "boxy, lightly furnished front parlour" anew, "jolted into strangeness". She notices "a sliver- framed color snapshot, its dyes ebbing, of her three children in bathing suits smiling beside a turquoise Connecticut swimming pool when they were all under 10, more than 30 years ago . . . "
Elsewhere, we are told, Hope - "dry-eyed through most of her life" - will "cry now just standing alone in a room". A powerful sense of time passing and past begins to preoccupy her, and the narrative. Although not a major work, Seek My Face is a subtle, honest, sombre one that engages through the power of its multiple truths.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Seek My Face. By John Updike, Hamish Hamilton, 276pp, £16.99