Brazil

Rating:
Summary: Don't forget: Updike is Really a Poet.
Review: Updike, over his amazingly fruitful career, has made few mistakes. Yet, in choosing to specialise in that most difficult of forms, the novel, he has inevitably made one or two. One that springs to mind is the problem of too-heavy plotting. He has got round this before (by mimicking classical myth in The Centaur; by avoiding plot altogether in the Bech books); but sometimes he has got it somehow wrong (the awkward-feeling burning down of the church at the end of Couples). In Brazil, by adopting the style of the so-called 'magical realists' of South America, he finds a new and successful solution to the problem of heavy-handed plotting. In this novel the plot is explicitly and self-consciously heavy: that's okay; that's the way it's meant to be. He goes with the grain. And so we have a novel about destiny, about inevitable truths, about inescapable conclusions. It works terribly well, in my opinion, and once again I think Updike has really triumphed. To read this rhetorical, confident, sensuous story is to be reminded that Updike is essentially a poet - most comfortable when he can dip at will - language always sinuous and confident - into the general meaning behind particular situations. I am very very glad that Updike wrote this book. It makes me happy to see the novel restored to its rightful form as extended prose-poem rather than the anyone-could-write-it, superjournalistic, mistakenly overdemocratic, boringly autobiographical and witlessly posturing yawns of so much contemporary fiction.