A Ladies' Man

What is more foolish than a grown man in love? In wine-bringing, anxious-phoning, effusive love. With someone else’s wife. Guilty and solicitous. His guilt and solicitude feeding one another like a bride and groom placing cake in each other’s mouths. Such a sweet, vain lover is Jerry Conant, hero of John Updike’s splendid novel MARRY ME (Knopf, $7.95).

In Marry Me Updike pursues a subject that has preoccupied him for twenty years: men in domestic life. The novel, as symmetrical as a nicely set table, describes a mutually adulterous romance. Jerry Conant and Sally Mathias want to abandon their partners and marry each other. The partners—Ruth Conant, Richard Mathias—as it happens, have had a more discreet and less intense affair of their own, which seasons the situation with a touch of justice and irony. All of this illicitness occurs in a time and place that Updike manages to portray (by implicit Contrast to the present) as idyllic: in “Greenwood,”a posh, green coastal suburb in Connecticut, something like Southport, in the dreamily distant early sixties—the Kennedy Years, for many Americans the last time when they could conceive of their country as innocent. The principals are in their thirties; their six children toddlers, grade-schoolers.

Despite the imminence of wrecked families, comedy informs the heart of Marry Me. Updike’s comic sense was sly and muted early in his career but has, since Couples, occupied a large part of his work. Marry Me recalls not only Couples but his most recent novel, A Month of Sundays, and yet the texture of the book is purely its own, wit intermingled with passion and sadness in a density Updike has not achieved before. There are some lovely antic inventions here, especially the figure of the cuckolded husband, Richard, an agreeable vulgarian with a Dickensian collection of physical oddities, a shambling, thicktorsoed man with a shaggy black head that is habitually tilted, a blind eye whose pupil appears “frosted.”But the comedy isn’t peripheral, or dependent on clever bits. It emanates from the book’s center, from its complicated hero, who is self-involved and charming, lustful and spiritual, thoughtful and obtuse, witty and pompous, deceiving and guileless. He also has a hard time keeping his roles straight: “Jerry’s fault as a lover, his cruel fault, was that he acted like a husband.”

A certain sort of hero has inhabited Updike’s pages, and Jerry Conant, though he clearly belongs in this group, represents a significant change in its membership. All of Updike’s heroes are “ladies’ men,” not necessarily in the colloquial meaning of that old phrase, but in its literal meaning—often bounders, they are always bound to women and to family. If they are lovers they are also husbands and sons. Many of them share enough of their author’s biography and sensibility to be called Updike Figures. (The clear exception is Rabbit Angstrom of the two novels that bear his name, in whom Updike locates extravagances of weakness and violence that the Updike Figure is not asked to bear. But Rabbit has similar psychological and spiritual woes.) The Updike Figure is well-educated, employed in a cerebral, well-paid, if not as often a satisfying way, a suburban sort, comforted by humility and an intimation of a divine order and wracked by longings that lie outside his domestic life. I’m thinking especially of the boyish antecedent to this man in The Centaur, of the hero in Of The Farm, of Richard Maples in the stories about his family, and of the narrator in many short stories told in the first person.

Though always regarded ruefully, even deprecatingly, the Updike Figure has also been an admirable type, his sensibility often misguided but still a rather dazzling sympathetic instrument. In Marry Me, Updike has made the bold, self-sacrificing, and inherently comic gesture of turning this favored fellow into a bit of a buffoon.

Jerry Conant is equally, amusingly, blind in his dealings with both wife and lover. At the end of a tryst in Washington he and Sally are stranded in National Airport, unable to catch a plane back to New York. There is a fine comedy of errors, involving efforts to rent cars, encounters with an old friend, forgotten luggage. At length Jerry declares with utter sincerity that their troubles are a sign that God has spoken and that they should return to the hotel, call their spouses, announce their intention to divorce and remarry. In the next moment the plane is announced and Jerry is suffused with pleasure and pride at their rescue. He speaks to both women with misplaced intensity and rationality. To Sally he worries constantly over his wife, thinks, “‘If only there was some decent man who I know would marry her and take care of her—but every man we know, compared to me is a clunk. Really, I’m not conceited, but that’s a fact.’ ” (For her part, Sally “wondered if that was why she loved him, that he could say something like that and still look boyish and expectant and willing to be taught.”)

On approaching his wife with news of his affair he turns inexplicably cheerful. Before he’s shared his “news,” he brings up the idea of divorce as a prospect she might find congenial: “ ‘Are you ever tempted to quit while we’re ahead?’ ”

Jerry is a boor but never boring. His conversation is persistently inappropriate, but the humor derives not only from his remarks being oddly out of place but from the fact that what he says is also plausible: he turns his mind inside out, brightly says what others in the same situation might darkly think. He is wholly ingenuous, a failed hypocrite, incapable of conventional amorality.

Marry Me is only in part a social comedy; Updike’s subtitle for the book is “a romance”—wry but in its way quite accurate. Its hero is an ultimate romantic who sees his love as nothing less than ideal. (Both women by contrast are enchantingly sensible.) Jerry is a domesticated Gatsby. Indeed, if this book has a father it is The Great Gatsby. Allowing for fifty years of progress in cynicism, the books pursue the same theme; and with stray rhythms and with his continual counterpoise between tenderness and comedy, Updike unobtrusively pays his respects to Fitzgerald.

The consummation Jerry Conant seeks is little less than divine. And it’s a crucial fact about Jerry that he is a believer. When he says God he means God. When he says hell, his mistress thinks with a shudder that he means an actual place.

Religion has loomed larger and larger in Updike’s work, and, despite the novel’s dominant tone, it is a major force in Marry Me. Theological imagery laces the book, and the use of it is a game for both author and characters. Greenwood is a “paradise” being destroyed by an appetite for the forbidden. Jerry and his wife (a minister’s daughter) speak naturally, if sometimes blasphemously, in the language of the church. Both women represent heaven to Jerry: “ ‘Heaven,’ ” he exclaims on entering his wife, and postcoitally he explains, “ ‘I had this very clear vision of the Bodily Ascension, of me going up and up into this incredibly soft, warm boundless sky: you.’ ”

Prior to his affair, Jerry has undergone a spiritual crisis, plagued by fear of death, when only religion helped. His bookcase is full of Karl Barth and N. A. Berdyaev.

Now sex helps. That the western world asks of sex what it formerly asked of religion is a commonplace idea, and not nearly so subtle as what Updike has in mind. His hero practices his marital infidelity as if it were a religion—his affair is a form of theological exploration. He revels in doubt, even as he longs for some imposition of certainty—a revelation—from outside. (In the absence of faith, indecision is the mind’s great stay against death.) His inability to choose between his two women becomes an agony of Kierkegaardian ambivalence. His mistress provides him with less physically than spiritually—she provides him with the possibility of perfection. His wife sees the problem: “Ruth disliked, religiously, the satisfaction he took in being divided, thereby confirming the split between body and soul that alone can save us from death.”

At it turns out, Jerry cannot choose Sally, but he can’t forsake her either. The book ends in a bizarre but dramatically inevitable scene, its hero isolated but still inseparable from the women, absurd and touching. He stands on a hill in St. Croix bathed in pink light and thinking, “The existence of this place satisfied him that there was a dimension in which he did go, as was right, at that party, or the next, and stand, timid and exultant, above the downcast eyes of her gracious, sorrowing face, and say to Sally, Marry Me.”

Right from the start—from the moment in his twenties when he began publishing in The New Yorker—Updike has unsettled critics. Who was this boy with the lapidary prose style? He “writes well,” but what does he “have to say?” He and his talent recalled the young Fitzgerald who in Edmund Wilson’s remark was “left with a jewel which he doesn’t know quite what to do with.” For years Updike has been accused of excessive cleverness and preciosity, of creating fiction that is all lacquered surface without substance.

That argument becomes less and less tenable, and in retrospect Updike seems to have treated his gift carefully. His first stories, in their attention to nuance, detail, evanescence, were cautious, not precious. One of them ends with “a perfect and luminous thought: ’You don’t know anything.'” Updike has always honored his own lack of knowledge.

His youthful talent was literally for “rendering,” and after Harvard he spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford. In his early fiction he seems to have felt that if he simply stared long enough at the surface of things they would reveal their essential meaning. In a sense his religious inclinations were there from the start. He wrote with devout appreciation for the stuff of the world, seemed to feel as his character, the debauched preacher in A Month of Sundays, feels: “Gratitude is the way He gets us, when we have gnawed off a leg to escape His other snares.”

His true subjects have gradually become clear. They are unusual. Never formally inventive, Updike has for some time been quietly daring in choosing to write about both homely and religious themes. In this book he makes so bold as to associate himself with the romantic tradition in the American novel. He contradicts a large segment of the country’s current literary imagination, but confirms a areat deal of its life.

Marry Me, for all its playfulness, is Updike’s most mature work. His writing has deepened, grown wiser and funnier, like a face that is aging well.