JOHN UPDIKE AND RELIGION: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace

#### JOHN UPDIKE AND RELIGION: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace.

Edited by James Yerkes. Eerdmans. 290 pp. $24

Preachers tend to read narrative (if at all) as fable or allegory. The intricate tissue of experiential detail vital to fiction is apt to be set aside as extrinsic to meaning and treated as an attractive but disposable container for the hard nugget of moral instruction within. Happily, no such tendency mars this collection of 15 essays by religious and literary scholars. The contributors all take fiction seriously enough to engage it on its own terms. They are able to confront irresolvable tensions without forcing resolution or resorting to what Updike calls "verdict" and "directive."

Prefacing the collection is Updike’s 1997 speech upon receiving the Campion Medal, awarded by the Catholic Book Club. After briefly questioning his eligibility, the author recalls his affiliation with three Protestant denominations (Lutheran, Congregational, and Episcopal) and the comfort and courage his Christian faith has given him: "For it tells us that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession; that the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable."

Updike notes that his first novel carried an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke, the second from Pascal, the third from Karl Barth, and the fifth from Paul Tillich. His character Harry Angstrom, he says, represents a Kierkegaardian figure: "man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives, condemned as if by otherworldly origins to perpetual restlessness."

Updike, by his own admission, is not a "Christian writer." What he has said of Harry Angstrom seems to apply to him as well: "Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out." And, while gratefully receiving the Campion Award, the novelist asked "to be absolved from any duty to provide orthodox morals and consolations in my fiction."

In the thought-provoking essays that follow the Campion speech, scholars explore the influence on Updike of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, and others, along with the impress of Updike’s early Lutheranism. Most memorable, on the literary side, is Charles Berryman’s essay "Faith or Fiction," which argues that the dark, tragic visions of the great naysayers Melville and Hawthorne cut closer to the nerve of living faith than do the muted affirmations of Updike.

A minor complaint: This collection suffers from an excess of civility; more dissent would have been bracing. Critics as astute as Alfred Kazin have praised Updike’s dazzling prose while questioning the depth of his work. The charge of "moral passivity" has been laid upon Updike’s writing more than once. His lavish depictions of sexual exploits—ostensibly a sort of hymning to the goodness of the created world—might also be viewed as evidence of the author’s captivity to the mores of contemporary secular culture. These essays duly note and answer such critical comments, but why not let a few of the critics speak for themselves? Surely the case made here for the authenticity of Updike’s religious search is strong enough, sufficiently supple and undoctrinaire, to permit the unconvinced their full voice.

—A. G. Mojtabai