VILLAGES
John Updike
Knopf
Fiction
ISBN: 1400042909

Owen Mackenzie, the protagonist of John Updike's latest novel, VILLAGES, is yet another in a long line of virile American men whose author --- whether Updike, Norman Mailer, or even Philip Roth --- defines him as the sum of his sexual experience and identifies with him so strongly that the character's masculinity reflects upon the author himself. This type of self-aggrandizing authorial projection seems mostly to have gone out of style as authors have either turned toward weightier matters (Roth) or simply grown very old (Mailer), but Updike still clings to this vicarious virility. As a result, VILLAGES, despite its contemporary setting and retrospective view of the twentieth century, feels woefully dated, a relic of the author's long-past heyday.

So, reading VILLAGES, we almost immediately lower our expectations and prepare ourselves for a slog through a literary vanity project. As with recent novels like IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES and SEEK MY FACE, it hinges on a tidy organizing concept: whereas those two novels traced the history of the twentieth century through religious fanaticism and post-war art, respectively, VILLAGES, which is presented as Owen's late-in-life reminiscences, chronicles the previous century through computer technology and extramarital sex.

Owen is a computer programmer riding the very first waves of the technology: during the 1950s he attends MIT, where he meets his first wife, Phyllis; during the '60s he develops a minor software package called DigitEyes and launches a new company, all while sleeping with a progression of housewives in the village of Middle Falls, Connecticut; and during the 1970s, he sells his share of the company to a small California-based company called Apple and leaves Phyllis for another woman. Updike explains contemporary trends in computer science every fifty pages or so, enough to show that he has done his research, but not enough to make it integral to the story. Instead, this aspect of VILLAGES seems like merely an overextended metaphor --- not quite enough for a novel --- although the similarities between Owen's upstart computer company and the dotcoms of the 1990s suggests this is fertile storytelling material.

Updike is much more interested in his main character's sexual experiences. Owen's entire life is one long midlife crisis, and he finally understands that he can quell his doubts and insecurities through illicit sex. But infidelity is no longer as scandalous as it was in 1960, when Updike published his famous novel on the subject, RABBIT RUN. The author's attempts at salacity read like re-walking old territory, especially since Owen bears more than a passing resemblance to Rabbit Angstrom.

Owen certainly has the ingrained misogynies of the era down: he speaks of marriage as taking "legal possession" and scorns women's desires as even needier and baser than his own. Perhaps Updike is merely trying to recreate the tenor of the times, evoking a timorous sexism as historical verisimilitude. However, especially during the novel's final 100 pages and specifically at its conclusion, it becomes alarmingly difficult to divine the characters' views from Updike's own, to keep from contemplating his involvement and his distance from these bizarrely antiquated ideas about women and sex.

The novel's deficiencies seem all the more glaring given Updike's fluid prose and occasionally beautiful imagery, which is all the more striking for being wholly unexpected. His sentences wander through time, beginning in the present when Owen is in his 70s, ricocheting off an errant memory and traveling backwards across the decades. If nothing else, Updike has become a poet of old-age retrospection, as if his characters can only gain an enlightening perspective on their lives when they are near death.

He is also capable of evoking striking imagery, none more haunting than that of a late-night, car-bound tryst between high school-age Owen and his girlfriend. "One night, parked this time up by the Victory Garden wasteland, where the streetlight was closer than on Cedar Top, he watched raindrops on the windshield make shadows on her chest, thin trails that hesitated and fell as his fingertips traced and tried to stop them, there, and there." Such passages possess a generous tenderness conspicuously missing from subsequent rendezvous, but are unable to redeem this disappointing novel from which we expect so much more.

   --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

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