2 of 4

Updike, like Hawthorne, is ambivalent about all this—he is no more nostalgic for Puritanism than Hawthorne was. But he is clear that in losing our sense of being a people under God—even if that God was the stern and meddlesome deity of Hawthorne's Puritans—we have lost something vital to our souls.

His books are not, as some have seen them, celebrations of our sexual coming of age. They are closer to laments. They are elegies for a world where so much has been trampled, squandered, forgotten, there is nothing left to profane.

Seek My Face, however, marks somewhat of a thematic departure for Updike. Mainly it allows him to display his impressive erudition on 20th century art, though the moral themes still lurk in the background.

The novel consists of a dialogue between Hope, an 80-something artist, and Kathryn, a 20-something journalist. Kathryn's main interest in Hope is that she was once married to Zack McCoy (a dead ringer for painter Jackson Pollock) and then Guy Holloway (a dead ringer for pop guru Andy Warhol). The conversation unfolds, with intricacy and delicacy, over the course of a single day.

Even here, though, Updike's concern for the loss of faith is not far beneath the surface—Hope threw off her austere Quaker upbringing as a young Bohemian artist but mourns its loss. Kathryn, two generations younger, meets Hope's religious nostalgia with either bewilderment or testiness. And the title is an allusion, cited in the book's epigraph, to Psalm 27: 11, a verse that comes as a call to seek God when foes taunt and strike, when friends betray and disappoint, when all false securities give way.

Updike's Rabbit series (Knopf, 1960, 1971, 1981, 1990)—four books that follow a single character from his 20s to death in his 60s—directly chronicles the erosion of personal identity, destiny, and faith through American Everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. He begins as a high-school basketball hero, trips headlong through the sexual and cultural tumult of the '60s, and then slumps into middle-aged, middle-class mediocrity. Along the way, Rabbit has brushes with God. But they are random, half-hearted, tepid. He's a spiritual drifter.

Roger's Version (Knopf, 1986)—the most Hawthornian of Updike's works—pits a diabolical theology professor, serpentine in his cunning, against a naïve evangelical student who is intent on proving God's existence mathematically. The student, to be sure, is barely recognizable as an evangelical. And the novel contains some of Updike's most elaborate sexual passages. But it also contains some of the most brilliant theological dialogue in any novel anywhere. The rich-textured debate on the relationship of doubt and certainty in religious faith is stunning.

Updike's masterpiece is In the Beauty of the Lilies (Knopf, 1996), a family saga that spans the 20th century. Through one family line, the book ingeniously refracts the culture-wide story of losing our religion.

The novel unfolds in four long chapters, each recounting the life of one family member in the lineage: Chapter One focuses on Clarence, a mild-mannered clergyman who loses his faith. Chapter Two follows his timid, listless son Theodore. Teddy, who becomes a postman because it's the path of least resistance, avoids church out of a vague but stubborn loyalty to his father. Chapter Three details the life of Teddy's daughter, Essie, who becomes a '50s glamour queen with starring roles alongside such icons as Rock Hudson and Clark Gable—then fades fast.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7