Self-Consciousness: Memoirs

Rating:
Summary: The Twists and Turns of Narcissm
Review: How does one become a writer? Well, from Updike's perspective all you need is some mindless ambition, coupled with a merely technical understanding of literature and writing. If one is to be great, then one must follow Updike's formula on creativity which is: the more unintelligible the better, and to the extent that the reader is frustrated and baffled, made to feel insecure and dumbfounded by an empty metaphor is the extent to which your novel succeeds. An author, Updike leads us to believe, sits high above in the stratosphere, writing tome upon tome of messianic goodness for the edification of the ignorant flock, who can't help but be awed by said author's transcendent knowledge. Updike is obviously on another level. Perhaps if I develop a megalomaniac delusional sense of self I could write just like him. That would be groovy.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful evocation of formative years
Review: John Updike is arguably, with Saul Bellow, the greatest of living authors writing in English. This volume exemplifies his strengths. His evocation of growing up in middle-America is often quite beautiful. Yet this book is not a memoir in the conventional sense of a chronological account, but more of series of scenes and reflections from a full and satisfying life. Updike's moving account of his struggle with psoriasis and his marital difficulties is personal without degenerating into the narcissism of so much second-rate autobiography, even if he pays slightly more attention to his rakish period in the 1970s than we might strictly wish to know.

Updike writes poignantly but with resolution of his lonely status as a liberal writer in the 1960s who did not lose his ideals as a liberal Democrat, in the traditional sense of that term, and thus who abjured the descent into extremism and anti-anti-Communism of many of his contemporaries. To have believed that the Vietnam War was imprudent and prosecuted by morally dubious means, yet known the noble cause that was at stake in it - namely, preventing a country from falling to a ferocious Communist tyranny - won Updike few friends and lost him many, yet his stance was an honourable and principled one.

The final chapter of the book is, for me, the best. Updike writes particularly well of his liberal religious faith, which almost amounts to fideism. One can admire his honest wrestling with such questions without sharing his conclusions, and admire even more the quality of writing and personal reflection here expressed.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Homecoming
Review: This is a beautiful book. From its extraordinary opening, as Updike returns to his childhood home, to its lucid and moving discourse "On Being a Self Forever," this book stands as one of Updike's most brilliant achievements. The memoir is structured, not as a chronological narrative of his life, but as a series of meditations on phases of his experience where Updike's search for the core of his own identity keeps criss-crossing with his search for a settled sense of meaning in the modern world. The writing is subtle, ironic, self-deprecating, utterly honest and luminous. The book itself is best seen, I think, as a worthy successor to a long line of works beginning, perhaps,with Wordsworth's The Prelude while it echoes the confessional voices of Augustine, on the one hand, and Robert Lowell on the other.