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Summary
Summary
One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century--and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series--delivers the intimate, generous, insightful, and beautifully written collection he was compiling when he died.
This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic. It concludes with a moving meditation on a modern world robbed of imagination--a world without religion, without art--and on the difficulties of faith in a disbelieving age.
In between are previously uncollected stories and poems, a pageant of scenes from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, five late "golf dreams," and several of Updike's commentaries on his own work. At the heart of the book are his matchless reviews--of John Cheever, Ann Patchett, Toni Morrison, William Maxwell, John le Carré, and essays on Aimee Semple McPherson, Max Factor, and Albert Einstein, among others. Also included are two decades of art criticism--on Chardin, El Greco, Blake, Turner, Van Gogh, Max Ernest, and more.
Updike's criticism is gossip of the highest order, delivered in an intimate and generous voice.
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Carduff has finished the job Updike began before his 2009 death, assembling nearly 100 uncollected pieces by "the preeminent literary journalist of our times." Predominantly comprising literary and art criticism from a range of magazines, the volume also embraces poetry, fiction, memoir, and Updike's comments on his own work. The hallmarks of his agile, eloquent prose are evident throughout, along with an exactitude of expression that was Updike's alone as he reviews works by such writers as John Cheever, le Carre, and Nabokov. Essays on artists such as El Greco, William Blake, and Turner, and some lesser known artists, blend his considerable knowledge with sometimes cranky wit: "For sheer viewer discomfort," a van Gogh show at the Met forces "too many people... in 'docile masses' to see practically nothing." The seven stories, including one initially accepted, then rejected, by the New Yorker, while not his best, are lively. Five essays on golf are humorous and wistful. The first piece, "The Writer in Winter," mourns the aging writer's occasional inability to think of the right word and defines the essence of fine prose, which "should have a flow, a foreword momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling into your ear." Updike's does. 40 illus. (Nov. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What are we to do without John Updike? We can, at least, savor this last collection of his miscellaneous prose (with a few poems thrown in). Generally, these are occasional pieces, and the occasions for which he was offered a chance to express himself were many and varied, from the New Yorker (his abiding and comfortable home) to AARP Magazine and Golf Digest. The blessed reader can be informed by an erudite discussion of humor in fiction, be in awe of how beautifully expressed his two-page tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction is, and marvel over the superb quality of his art criticism, remembering that he was not trained in art history and criticism but came to it naturally, armed with intelligence, taste, and a critical eye. Lines to remember jump out left and right. This one is in reference to Raymond Carver, Some hard times are part of every writer's equipment. These pieces support Updike's reputation as a gracious and generous critic, but he was no pushover; his review of Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills (2007) gives us this startling opening comment, Her capacious new novel does not give the reader a warm welcome the first chapter is cloying and confusing. A book to be kept at hand and appreciated and challenged by for a long time to come.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT is the fate of some writers to be accused of writing too well. In one form or another, the charge has been lodged against authors as different as Vladimir Nabokov (too clever), Richard Wilbur (too elegant) and Garry Wills (too authoritative). But among major American literary figures of recent times, John Updike is the one about whom the complaint (too fluent, too lavish, too prolific) is most common. Between his first book, "The Carpentered Hen" (1958), and his death in 2009, Updike produced more than 60 volumes: novels; story collections; nonfiction on anything from writers and artists to baseball, dinosaurs, Broadway and golf; children's tales; poetry; a historical play; forewords; afterwords; and everything in between. Now comes a posthumous collection entitled "Higher Gossip" - a phrase that its editor, Christopher Carduff, borrows from Updike's description of the practice of book reviewing. For some readers, this book will doubtless confirm that Updike was a writer so enthralled by his own talent that he couldn't hold anything back, even from beyond the grave. In fact, "Higher Gossip" is a deftly edited reminder of what a prodigy we have lost. In the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis, Updike had hoped to pull something like this book together from previously published works going back to the early 1970s. He had arranged them in three shirt boxes (one for book reviews; another for art criticism; a third for what he called "oddments"). As was his practice whenever fugitive pieces had accumulated sufficiently to fill a new volume, he was not planning simply to reproduce the texts from tear sheets of the original published versions. He had already revised many of them on his personal computer and printed them afresh. Carduff's selection is more than a convenient assemblage of works once scattered among periodicals ranging from Golf Digest to The New Yorker to the AARP magazine (from which he draws a beautiful essay, "The Writer in Winter"). He also includes some virtually unknown essays, notably a reflection on visiting a football factory, published in 1989 in the Sunday magazine of The Observer of London, and later in a small edition privately printed in Finland. Updike was a writer of fluctuating moods, and all are on display here. He could be sentimental about childhood, cruel about "old ladies gathering in dusty parlors to pool the titillations of their dwindling days," and pityingly envious of the young, "no better at extracting happiness from their animal health than we were." Perhaps the most serious charge against him is that he viewed the human world from a disdainful distance - watching, with a certain voyeuristic pleasure, as people botched their lives. It is a slander. He was unstintingly alert to the significance with which, sometimes desperately, we invest the smallest incidents and sensations - especially in retrospect, when "customary reticence is discarded, as needless baggage from the forsaken world of midlife responsibilities," and "our tears fatten upon our memories of joy." He wrote with tactile intensity about everything, be it a boy petting with his first girlfriend in the car as moonlight "anointed her bare front with the shadows of raindrops still clinging to the windshield" or the feel of fingering the "merry dimples" of a golf ball. But he wrote best, I think, about the gray world of blocked aspiration that his parents inhabited in the barely middleclass town of Shillington, Pa., where his mother was an unpublished writer and his father a schoolteacher at a time when teachers were "well below machinists and full-fashioned knitters in the scale of prestige." In his memoir "Self-Consciousness" (1989), Updike explained that it was the desire for filial revenge - not against, but on behalf of, his parents - that drove him out of Shillington to make his name by lifting their cramped world into renown. And so he did, with an exquisite balance of intimacy and detachment, in "The Centaur" (1963), "Olinger Stories" (1964) and the tetralogy of novels about Rabbit Angstrom, from "Rabbit, Run" (1960) through "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990). Like those books, "Higher Gossip" is the work of a writer who never forgot, as the phrase goes, "where he came from." Although Updike went to college at Harvard, it was the shabby streets and dives of 1950s Harvard Square that "saved me from the academic vapors," and the university from "preciosity." And while he is often thought of as writing mainly about life in the "fragile suburban simulacra of paradise," he never quite gave his heart, it seems to me, to his adopted New England - at least not to its tidy side of smooth lawns and whitewashed houses. He is best when remembering his pre-celebrity pleasure walking on ragged public golf courses, where, paired with the local barber or grocer, he hit off "broken tees pried into the interstices of rubber mats." He always wrote, as he says of Edith Wharton, in "striking empathy with the losers of the world, without ... wanting to be one of them." "Higher Gossip" is also a record of a writer responding with reflective spontaneity to his contemporaries. It's amusing to witness Updike's startled notice when Jane Smiley carries sexual explicitness far beyond where he left it in "Couples" (1968), which was among the first "serious" books by an American writer to employ the words that people actually use for private body parts. He is tough on Toni Morrison for rendering a character as "less a participant in the action than a visitor from the Land of Allegory," and disappointed with a biography of John Cheever for its failure to convey the "glimmers of grace and well-being" that its subject was able to extract from his darkly troubled life. Updike was frequently given to indulging his gift for image-making, and so there is a certain literary vanity on display in "Higher Gossip" - as when, in an essay about J. M. W. Turner, he likens the small human figures on a large canvas to "a spatter of colored jelly beans at the base of a mountain," or when, in the essay on the football factory, he describes discarded patches of leather as "minimal and tangled like a wet bikini." There's a lapse of discipline in the retention of such firstdraft flourishes. But if the blue pencil might have been deployed a little more, the rewards of "Higher Gossip" far outweigh its defects. The essays on art - from Tilman Riemenschneider to Egon Schiele - are a special pleasure, informative but personal, meticulously attentive to technique and effect, composed with almost wistful awe by a writer who had once hoped to be an artist himself. (Carduff promises a fuller future selection, complete with color plates.) "Illustrations," Updike once confessed, in a sentence whose shifting tenses conflate past with present, "affected me more strongly than reality; a picture of falling snow, for example, whether in black-and-white line drawing or blurry four-color reproduction, moves me more than any actual storm." His own word-pictures - of events remembered, books read, pictures seen, games played, loves grasped and relinquished - are among the gifts of our literature. "Perhaps," he writes in an essay on humor, "one reason we laugh so much in childhood is that so much is unexpected and novel to us, and perhaps fiction revives that laughter by giving us back the world clearer than we have seen it before." In the end, he was modest. The world is clarified not only by his fiction, but by almost everything he wrote. Some have accused Updike of viewing the human world from a disdainful distance. That is a slander. Andrew Delbanco's new book, "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be," will be published next year.
Choice Review
Between 1965 and 2010, Updike published ten titles categorized, in the extensive list of his published works, as "essays and criticism." The present volume, which gathers more previously uncollected essays and short fiction, plus five poems, joins those ten. The pieces date from about 1970 to the last years of his life. Although Updike had done some work on the compilation, the final product is the work of well-known editor Christopher Carduff. He put the volume together at the request of Updike's widow and, it seems, with Updike's approval, granted during the brief time between diagnosis of his inoperable lung cancer and his death in January 2010. Most interesting in this volume are the art exhibition reviews; pieces on Updike's onetime home in Ipswich, Massachusetts; miscellaneous forewords and notes to his own fiction; and, in particular, the two 2008 lead essays of the volume, "The Writer in Winter" and "A Desert Encounter." Both individually and taken together, the 2008 essays constitute probing views by Updike on his life as author. Their circumspect wisdom, part of which is Updike's dealing with the aging process, is the later Updike at his best. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. S. Miller Texas A&M University
Kirkus Review
Picked-Up Pieces, 1975, etc.). The current volume contains poems and short fiction as well as book reviews, art criticism, forewords and afterwords, comments and letters and speeches. Reading them consecutively causes a reader's jaw to drop in astonishment at the range of Updike's talents and interests. There are valedictory pieces (an emotional poem about Massachusetts General Hospital, a piece about time's effects on a writer); explicit reminders that a writer's duty is to bring news to the reader; curmudgeonly complaints about crowded art exhibits; praise for colleagues; potshots at biographers (he did not care for Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life, 2009); pieces that reveal his intimacy with subjects including Aimee Semple McPherson, the history of golf in Massachusetts, the drawings of Van Gogh, the planet Mars, the stories of his adopted town of Ipswich, Mass. Throughout are reminders of what readers lost when Updike died: the perfect word, the graceful sentences that somehow seem impossible to improve, the wry humor, the vast knowledge and the humility. In one essay, he identifies a handful of principles he followed in his book-reviewing, and in a dazzling long piece he talks about the genesis and composition of his four Rabbit novels--perhaps his greatest literary achievement. A lyrical, lovely display of Updike's protean powers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This gathering of Updike's previously uncollected essays and art/exhibition reviews-in a section here called "Gallery Tours"-exemplifies his wide range of interests from 1970 onward. He was pulling these pieces together when he died in early 2009. Updike's comments on the writing of Charles Schulz, Ann Patchett, and Toni Morrison are balanced with observations on Tiger Woods and recollections of a tour of a factory that constructed footballs. (There is probably no baseball here because the pieces have all been previously collected.) The collection enables readers to see with Updike's wide lens as well as his sharp focus. Essential for large literary collections.-J.S. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THE WRITER IN WINTER Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. There is no Senior Tour for authors, with the tees shortened by twenty yards and carts allowed. No mercy is extended by the reviewers; but, then, it is not extended to the rookie writer, either. He or she may feel, as the gray-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume the oxygen in the increasingly small room of the print world, that the elderly have the edge, with their established names and already secured honors. How we did adore and envy them, the idols of our college years-Hemingway and Faulkner, Frost and Eliot, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty! We imagined them aswim in a heavenly refulgence, as joyful and immutable in their exalted condition as angels forever singing. Now that I am their age-indeed, older than a number of them got to be- I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity. You are not yet typecast. You can take a distant, cold view of the entire literary scene. You are full of your material-your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation-when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first twenty years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By the age of forty, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings. You become playful and theoretical; you invent sequels, and attempt historical novels. The novels and stories thus generated may be more polished, more ingenious, even more humane than their predecessors; but none does quite the essential earthmoving work that Hawthorne, a writer who dwelt in the shadowland "where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet," specified when he praised the novels of Anthony Trollope as being "as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case." This second quotation-one writer admiring a virtue he couldn't claim- meant a lot to me when I first met it, and I have cited it before. A few images, a few memorable acquaintances, a few cherished phrases circle around the aging writer's head like gnats as he strolls through the summertime woods at gloaming. He sits down before the word processor's humming, expectant screen, facing the strong possibility that he has already expressed what he is struggling to express again. My word processor-a term that describes me as well-is the last of a series of instruments of self-expression that began with crayons and colored pencils held in my childish fist. My hands, somewhat grown, migrated to the keyboard of my mother's typewriter, a portable Remington, and then, schooled in touch-typing, to my own machine, a beige Smith Corona expressly bought by loving parents for me to take to college. I graduated to an office model, on the premises of The New Yorker, that rose up, with an exciting heave, from the surface of a metal desk. Back in New England as a free-lancer, I invested in an electric typewriter that snatched the letters from my fingertips with a sharp, premature clack; it held, as well as a black ribbon, a white one with which I could correct my many errors. Before long, this clever mechanism gave way to an even more highly evolved device, an early Wang word processor that did the typing itself, with a marvellous speed and infallibility. My next machine, an IBM, made the Wang seem slow and clunky and has been in turn superseded by a Dell that deals in dozens of type fonts and has a built-in spell checker. Through all this relentlessly advancing technology the same brain gropes through its diminishing neurons for images and narratives that will lift lumps out of the earth and put them under the glass case of published print. With ominous frequency, I can't think of the right word. I know there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language. But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness. Eventually, with shamefaced recourse to my well-thumbed thesaurus or to a germane encyclopedia article, I may pin the word down, only to discover that it unfortunately rhymes with the adjoining word of the sentence. Meanwhile, I have lost the rhythm and syntax of the thought I was shaping up, and the paragraph has skidded off (like this one) in an unforeseen direction. When, against my better judgment, I glance back at my prose from twenty or thirty years ago, the quality I admire and fear to have lost is its carefree bounce, its snap, its exuberant air of slight excess. The author, in his boyish innocence, is calling, like the sorcerer's apprentice, upon unseen powers-the prodigious potential of this flexible language's vast vocabulary. Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling into your ear. An aging writer wonders if he has lost the ability to visualize a completed work, in its complex spatial relations. He should have in hand a provocative beginning and an ending that will feel inevitable. Instead, he may arrive at his ending nonplussed, the arc of his intended tale lying behind him in fragments. The threads have failed to knit. The leap of faith with which every narrative begins has landed him not on a far safe shore but in the middle of the drink. The failure to make final sense is more noticeable in a writer like Agatha Christie, whose last mysteries don't quite solve all their puzzles, than in a broad-purposed visionary like Iris Murdoch, for whom puzzlement is part of the human condition. But in even the most sprawling narrative, things must add up. The ability to fill in a design is almost athletic, requiring endurance and agility and drawing upon some of the same mental muscles that develop early in mathematicians and musicians. Though writing, being partly a function of experience, has few truly precocious practitioners, early success and burnout are a dismally familiar American pattern. The mental muscles slacken, that first freshness fades. In my own experience, diligent as I have been, the early works remain the ones I am best known by, and the ones to which my later works are unfavorably compared. Among the rivals besetting an aging writer is his younger, nimbler self, when he was the cocky new thing. From the middle of my teens I submitted drawings, poems, and stories to The New Yorker; all came back with the same elegantly terse printed rejection slip. My first break came late in my college career, when a short story that I had based on my grandmother's slow dying of Parkinson's disease was returned with a note scrawled in pencil at the bottom of the rejection slip. It read, if my failing memory serves: "Look-we don't use stories of senility, but try us again." Now "stories of senility" are about the only ones I have to tell. My only new experience is of aging, and not even the aged much want to read about it. We want to read, judging from the fiction that is printed, about life in full tide, in love or at war-bulletins from the active battlefields, the wretched childhoods, the poignant courtships, the fraught adulteries, the big deals, the scandals, the crises of sexually and professionally active adults. My first published novel was about old people; my hero was a ninety-year-old man. Having lived as a child with aging grandparents, I imagined old age with more vigor, color, and curiosity than I could bring to a description of it now. I don't mean to complain. Old age treats free-lance writers pretty gently. There is no compulsory retirement at the office, and no athletic injuries signal that the game is over for good. Even with modern conditioning, a ballplayer can't stretch his career much past forty, and at the same age an actress must yield the romantic lead to a younger woman. A writer's fan base, unlike that of a rock star, is post-adolescent, and relatively tolerant of time's scars; it distressed me to read of some teen-ager who, subjected to the Rolling Stones' halftime entertainment at a recent Super Bowl, wondered why that skinny old man (Mick Jagger) kept taking his shirt off and jumping around. The literary critics who coped with Hemingway's later, bare-chested novel Across the River and Into the Trees asked much the same thing. By and large, time moves with merciful slowness in the old-fashioned world of writing. The eighty-eight-year-old Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Elmore Leonard and P. D. James continue, into their eighties, to produce best-selling thrillers. Although books circulate ever more swiftly through the bookstores and back to the publisher again, the rhythms of readers are leisurely. They spread recommendations by word of mouth and "get around" to titles and authors years after making a mental note of them. A movie has a few weeks to find its audience, and television shows flit by in an hour, but books physically endure, in public and private libraries, for generations. Buried reputations, like Melville's, resurface in academia; avant-garde worthies such as Cormac McCarthy attain, late in life, best-seller lists and The Oprah Winfrey Show. A pervasive unpredictability lends hope to even the most superannuated competitor in the literary field. There is more than one measurement of success. A slender poetry volume selling fewer than a thousand copies and receiving a handful of admiring reviews can give its author a pride and sense of achievement denied more mercenary producers of the written word. As for bad reviews and poor sales, they can be dismissed on the irrefutable hypothesis that reviewers and book buyers are too obtuse to appreciate true excellence. Over time, many books quickly bloom and then vanish; a precious few unfold, petal by petal, and become classics. An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. The pleasures, for him, of bookmaking-the first flush of inspiration, the patient months of research and plotting, the laser-printed final draft, the back-and- forthing with Big Apple publishers, the sample pages, the jacket sketches, the proofs, and at last the boxes from the printers, with their sweet heft and smell of binding glue-remain, and retain creation's giddy bliss. Among those diminishing neurons there lurks the irrational hope that the last book might be the best. A DESERT ENCOUNTER In our fifth winter in the Southwest, my wife discovered that her gardening skills could be turned to xerophilous plants. All afternoon, she had served as my assistant and directress in pruning some ocotillo, and was enough exhilarated by the results to turn my attention to our overgrown hedge of mixed olive and oleander. Ocotillo is a tall, wandlike candlewood with vicious thorns and a feathery orange flower at its tip; handling it, even with thick leather gloves, requires the concentration of a bomb squad. The electric trimmer I had borrowed for the massy hedge was dull and noisy. Further, the electric socket on our porch was distant, a hundred-foot extension cord away. I had to keep crawling on my hands and knees through gaps in the hedge to take the trimmer, trailing the gnarling extension cord, to the other side. And then there was the spindly aluminum stepladder that I had to keep shifting and leaning against springy branches to gain access to the hedge's overgrown top. Our condo sits on a slant, in the foothills of a pink-and-tan mountain range, which made moving the ladder one-handed and then balancing my weight on its higher steps feel heroically precarious. My sense of triumph when my wife and I agreed that the job had been completed was marred by a mysterious circumstance: my hat had disappeared. Repeatedly getting down on my hands and knees to search beneath the hedge and circling the stony area of caliche where I had labored, I failed to find it. At this latitude, the elderly need to shelter their heads against the intemperate desert sun, and I discovered within myself an agitating grief in regard to the disappearance of the hat, a simple, brimmed floppy affair bearing the logo of an organization of which, years ago, I had been pleased to be elected a member. Even as the shadows were deepening in the saguaro-studded mountain clefts, and the sun was lowering over the blue range to the west, I, with the circular compulsions of an aging brain, kept wandering out of doors, convinced that one more search in and around the hedge and the ocotillo would produce my missing headgear. A breadth of paving passes close by the hedge. There, on the slanting asphalt, part parking lot and part side road, a curious confluence arose: an ancient man, brightly dressed in white trousers and a striped, starched shirt, made his ragged way downhill with the help of a cane, while, nearby, a Roto-Rooter operative in a khaki uniform was packing up his truck at the end of his workday. Oleander roots work their way into the clay drainage pipes of our aging complex and obstruct flow. The gentleman in white trousers greeted me as if we had often met before, though we had not. "What are you doing?" he asked, tilting his head to receive the answer. I decided to be honest, however foolish it made me seem. "I'm looking for my hat." The Roto-Rooter man overheard us. "Hat?" he echoed. "There's a hat over here." By "over here" he meant the curb on the far side of the asphalt, where it had never occurred to me, in all my peering around and under the hedge, to cast a glance. The hat must have fallen from my head in the course of my awkward, preoccupying struggles, and the desert breeze that springs up in the late afternoon had moved it twenty feet away. "My hat!" I exclaimed. "It is!" I hurried over and, as if to prove my ownership to my two new companions, put it on my head. "Thank you, thank you," I said to each. The man in khaki smiled, his share of my pleasure appropriately moderate, as he coiled his rooter and distributed the last of his tools to their places in the back of his truck. The older man, however, bent and bowlegged as he was, made my happiness his own. Quizzically beaming, he came closer to me, the shadow of his cane elongating to the east, where the last golfers at the local country club, calling to one another like birds at dawn, were finishing their rounds before darkness fell. "What does it say on your hat?" he asked me. Excerpted from Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
