Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis

mind and always has been, part of all our minds, the material man who sulks and gloats about sex and money. With Rabbit is Rich (1982), the third in the sequence, the hitherto fruitless homage to Joyce finds a truly modern application; at last Updike is elaborating and not just annotating Ulysses, urging it further into the twentieth century.
    It comes in the form of Henry Bech, the eponym of Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech is Back (1983). 'I keep meaning to kill Bech,' says Updike, viciously; but he won't go away. Rabbit differs from Updike the man. Bech differs from Updike the writer: he is highbrow, cosmopolitan, single and Jewish, thus allowing Updike, through a feat of empathic daring, to arrogate a culture that has 'kept the secret of its laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world'. Updike echoes Malamud: 'By developing a Jewish persona I was saying something like: "Look, I'm really Jewish too. We're all Jewish here." ' But he was also challenging that domination, typically demanding more than his fair share. Another voice, another 'third person', witty, wounded and historically central.
    Then there is mainstream Updike, the fiction from the horse's mouth. Or (it must be said) from the horse's backside, in the case of The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which has just been filmed. The movie is so preposterous that critics have been protective about its source, forgetting that the book is preposterous too: crammed with beauties, but winsome, whimsical, haloed in a seamless futility. It would appear, though, that Updike is the better for the occasional holidays from merit (or therapeutic indulgences), because his most recent book is the near-masterpiece Roger's Version. A meditation on death and creation in the pale light of a modern city, it is the richest, funniest and gloomiest book that Updike has yet written. To him, the future may not look as bright as it once did, but to his readers it has never looked brighter.
     
    'Shit,' said Updike. It was his one profanity of the morning. He had just led me into the wrong carpark. We were leaving Mass. General and proceeding to Harvard, where Updike had a lunch.
    'You once wrote a novel, or a "romance", called Marry Me,' I said. 'Your new book of stories is called Trust Me. But maybe you should have called it Divorce Me.'
    For the book is riven with divorce and its aftermath. Brave ex-wives and their watchful replacements, half-grown children seldom seen, possessions divided, houses scoured and then abandoned. 'They don't call them orphanages any more, do they?' asks one character. 'They call them normal American homes.' I put this to Updike, and quoted the line: 'In the pattern of his generation he had married young, had four children, and eventually got a divorce.'
    'A pattern, that's right. Marriage was very erotic when I was growing up. You got married in college and had kids when you were still kids yourselves. Four children in two-year notches. It was the same for everybody we knew. The marginal couples stayed together. The ones who were any fun all broke up. In my case we'd just had enough of each other. It was terrible for the children, having to become grownups overnight.'
    This turned out to be the third time Updike and I had met. He couldn't remember the second time, when I had shaken his hand at a London publishing party. And I couldn't remember the first time, when I was a nine-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. 'I spent an evening with your mother and father and some other people. Were you there? You might have been in bed. We played cards. We were all drunk but no one, I think, was as drunk as your father.'
    'Those were wild times. Everyone was at it.'
    'So I've read,' said Updike. 'So I've read. It was a revolution for all of us - not just for Abbie Hoffman. Kind of a dark carnival. We were all wearing love-beads, in a way.'
    Three years later, my parents duly divorced. Divorce, in those days, was like