Updike Shines Light on September 11^th

We depend upon our poets to interpret our times, and I’ve been sorely waiting for over a year for one of them to shine light into the deep national wound of 9/11. Surely, William Langwiesche has clarified the technical dimensions of the catastrophe; Susan Sontag has deconstructed the pre-history along with our reaction to the event; and Bruce Springsteen has gifted us with good grieving in his cathartic “The Rising.”

But not until John Updike published his short story “Varieties of Religious Experience” in November’s Atlantic, have people outside New York and in the rest of the English speaking world been enabled with a vicarious grasp and experience of the attack.

In the way that a child turns to his parent to listen to and explain a nightmare, we finally derive unified understanding from a revered guardian of American letters. And as in the case of the terrorized child, while neither the evil nor its memory goes away, the narrative—Updike’s story—restores reality and lets us sleep through the night.

Updike’s short story lines up four episodes from four different points of view. The first is from Dan Kellogg, who, like many Americans that witnessed the catastrophe from afar, has his values and faith shaken as he struggles to answer questions posed by his precocious granddaughter. The second episode flashes back to a week before the 11^th and is set in a Florida strip club, where Mohamed, one of the conspirators, vindictively immerses himself in the pit of western immorality and corruption. Updike flashes forward in the third episode to a dizzying recreation of the absurd, improbable collapse of the world’s largest buildings, as physically felt and intellectually fathomed by a bond trader on one of the top floors. And the fourth scene takes place on the flight from Newark, from the point of view of an elderly female passenger, in which Updike fills in the pictures before and after the famously brave quote by another of the passengers: “You guys ready? Let’s roll.”

Reviews of single short stories are infrequent, but this is too important to leave unproclaimed. Every literate person in America who knows we make sense of the world and of our own lives by making stories, needs to read “Varieties.” To simply read about the tragedy is like listening to someone talk in his sleep, while reading fiction, specifically Updike’s fiction, transports us into the dream (or nightmare) of September 11^th

Updike accomplishes this illusion with the jarring but graceful imagery we’ve grown to expect from him, as when his first narrator Dan Kellogg can barely comprehend his sight of the gargantuan tower’s collapse: “as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise.”

When Kellogg is subsequently asked by his granddaughter why God let the terrorists commit this act, “He had an answer, a new one to this, but he didn’t give it”—that “new” one being that maybe God’s not there. Later, when Kellogg and his family join the Episcopalian congregation for a 9/11 prayer service, he looks around and observes: “Like dogs, we creep back to lick the hand of a God who, if He exists, has just given us a vicious kick.”

Pivoting neatly off factual reportage involving two of the 19 terrorists having spent time drinking and bragging in a Florida saloon, the second installment in Updike’s story shows on stage an American exotic dancer from behind terrorist Mohammed’s liquor-reddened, righteous eyes: “…a young woman, naked save for strategic patches of tinsel and a dusting of glitter, writhed around a brass pole to a virtually mocking mutter of tuneless music.” For him, she represents “this unclean [American] society disfigured by supposed opportunities and pleasures,” against which he has meticulously prepared to strike a blow that will guarantee his berth in paradise.

And in precisely the moment that Updike’s craft has us sniffing tobacco smoke and booze on our own sleeves from that Florida roadhouse, we are brusquely elevated in scene three to the 90^th floor of Tower One, where we get instead, “A rising smell, a tarry industrial smell, oily and sweet, remind[ing]…of airport runways, and the heat vibrations one sees while waiting to take off.” Bond trader Jim Finch, on the phone with his wife, is all but overcome as he stays low, making his way to the windows, where, “Like an airplane seizing altitude in its wings, he left gravity behind.”

Yet Updike’s tale is not to be confused with pathos.

As with any solid short story, there is identification and tension, particularly in Updike’s seeming clairvoyant unfolding of events of the jet that crashed in the infamous Pennsylvania cornfield. There is also resolution—a symbolic evolution and hope—to be found not just in the straightforward action of passengers, but in the simple words of children, particularly those of Kellogg’s grandchildren speaking of the spotlights replacing the Twin Towers in the story’s last line:

“’Don’t be scared,’ her younger sister told her. ‘My teacher says the blue lights are like the rainbow. They mean it won’t happen again.’”

Updike is not making any promises. Poet, critic, author of over fifty books, he has just done his job, finally. He has come through by making his fiction, which, like hypnosis practiced by a therapist, transports us to the horrific 9/11 reality that has been heretofore inaccessible to most.

It doesn’t get more accessible or more right or more true than when wrought by John Updike.

DM