Updike Revealed

I waited on Amazon’s virtual Internet line to buy one of the first copies shipped of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike.  Any reader of my blog knows he is my favorite author, I think the best of the late 20^th century, along with Philip Roth.  But unlike most of his contemporaries, he flourished in all venues, poetry, short story, novels, as well as being a brilliant man of letters.  As George Gershwin was to American music, Updike was to American Literature.

I wondered whether any biographer would be up to the task of capturing the breadth of his accomplishments.  The literary biography bar had already been set very high by the relatively recent biographies of other important late twenty century writers, Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Blake Bailey’s Cheever,A Life, and also by Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty; The Life and Work of Richard Yates.

In fact, I thought Blake Bailey would emerge as the ideal biographer of John Updike (but he is now working on a biography of Philip Roth which will round out the pantheon of “my” authors). Adam Begley may have had an inside track.  His father, Louis Begley, another author I admire, knew Updike.  They were at Harvard together as undergraduates, although Begley went in a totally different career direction upon graduation, into the law, until he found himself writing novels towards the end of his career and now into retirement. For me, there is an uncanny connection between Louis Begley and John Updike as social commentators, capturing the times I’ve lived.  I explained my case here and here, so no sense going into further detail in this entry.

And so back to Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike, who I felt I “grew up with” and admired from afar, reading most of his incredible output with such admiration and wonder that one person could write so prodigiously and with such high literary quality.  Like Roy Hobbs, Updike was a “natural.”  He made poetry out of the quotidian.

Begley’s biography is superb, treating Updike with both reverence and objectivity.  In fact, my rose colored glasses of Updike were somewhat removed by the biography.  To my surprise, Updike was less than a perfect human being!  And he indeed lived the life he described in the novel so often associated with him, Couples.  I don’t make this observation as a moral criticism, but more as an abandonment of a certain naiveté I’ve had about Updike.  It doesn’t change my love of his work or my assessment of his importance to the world of American literature.  In fact, I think Begley’s biography will go a long way in assuring his place as one of the most important American writers, period.  

Begley well documents Updike’s four stages of life, his cloistered childhood in Shillington and Plowville, PA, his Harvard years where he acquired “a monumental erudition,” the period of his first marriage to Mary during which time they raised a family of four children in Ipswich, MA and he established himself as a writer of consequence, and his second marriage to Martha during which time he wrote from the perspective of an acknowledged senior statesman of American literature.

Although Updike finally left his home town of Shillington, PA, that town never left him or his fiction, nor did his later residence in Ipswich MA after he graduated from Harvard (and married in his Junior year, just as I did).  But before Ipswich, he worked at The New Yorker for a while and lived the life of a young NY writer.  The New Yorker and Updike were inseparable during his entire career. In fact there were generations of Updikes published in that venerable magazine, some of his mother’s short stories and stories by his son, David.  All three mined autobiography for their fiction and Updike felt a little “crowded” by his mother and then son appearing in the same pages (although their contributions were minimal compared to his).

Having left New York, as well as Shillington, he developed two alter egos to deal with “what might have been.”  He imagined a life of Harry Angstrom in his Rabbit tetrology….a high school basketball star in PA, but then what?  And in a number of short stories he imagined a life of Henry Bech, a writer from the “New York school of writing.”  The Maple short stories, on the other hand, closely chronicled his deteriorating first marriage even detailing his own children.  In fact if there was anything that stands out in Begley’s biography it is how Updike extracted fiction from his personal experiences; absolutely nothing escaped his omniscient eye. 

After his second marriage, Updike and Martha moved more inland, away from Ipswich, to Georgetown, MA (and years later to Haven Hill, a mansion in Beverly Farms MA, and although on the sea, still secluded).  He lived a more isolated life during his later years.  Begley notes that there he was “settled and safe – out of harm’s way – and free from the time – and energy-consuming entanglements of the riotously unmonogamous Ipswich lifestyle.  But he worried that he was putting too much distance between himself and the sources of his inspiration.”  Updike himself, after nine months into his second marriage said, “One of the problems of being a fiction writer is that of gathering experience.  The need for seclusion and respectability that goes with some success, both are very sheltering – they cut you off from painful experience.  We all want to avoid painful experience, and yet painful experience is your chief resource as a writer.”

Curiously enough, as Begley points out, as a young writer Updike made his mark without the anger and torment of so many of his contemporary writers.  “He wasn’t despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn’t alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one.  In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers.  Even his neuroses were tame.  Except for his psoriasis, his stutter, and his intermittent religious doubts, he faced no obstacle that hard work and natural talent couldn’t overcome.” Perhaps that is because Updike came from a cocoon of love and protection and adulation, his mother recognizing his genius (and he was a bone-fide one), fostering it and in a sense living out her own dream as a writer through her only child.  They had a close relationship throughout Updike’s life.  In fact, his mother was a published author, but her focus was always on her son

And indeed, Updike was a hard worker and devoted himself to writing most days of his life when he was not travelling, playing golf or sometimes poker, or philandering (although, gathering information from all those activities).

I think Begley gets to the heart of “what made Updike run” – especially during his Ipswich years, by putting his finger on what always puzzled me about Updike, his strong religious vein, usually disguised in his novels but prominent in works such as Roger’s Version. It seemed to be somewhat inconsistent with the life he led.  In Ipswich he joined the First Congregational Church (ironically the same religion in which I was brought up, but abandoned as an adult).  Religion to Updike was a constant fulcrum in his life, a hinge on which to swing between the fear of death, to his infidelities. Begley hones right in on the issue:

Surrounded by disbelief more or less politely concealed, he refused to play along -- "I decided ... I would believe." Though he disapproved of pragmatic faith, he was well aware of the utility of his own special brand of piety: "Religion enables us to ignore nothingness," he wrote, "and get on with the jobs of life." He explained the tenacity of his faith by pointing to the part played by fear: "The choice seemed to come down to: believe or be frightened and depressed all the time." On a good day, faith in God gave him confirmation that he mattered -- "that one's sense of oneself as being of infinite value is somewhere in the universe answered, that indeed one is of infinite value." Religion eased his existential terror, allowing him to do his work, and to engage in the various kinds of play that best amused him-among them the hazardous sport of falling for his friends' wives. He was caught in a vicious circle: he fell in love, and his adulterous passion made him feel alive, but also sparked a religious crisis that renewed his fear of death -- so he fell in love some more and read some more theology. Not surprisingly, his wife found that she couldn't tell when he exhibited signs of angst, whether he was suffering from religious doubt or romantic torment.

Furthermore, Updike recognized his exceptionalism as a writer and hoarded every document, doodling (he was an expert cartoonist and almost went into the profession of animation), every letter he received.  These, he knew, would be a treasure trove for future literary researchers after his death. Even by the time he was in college, Updike had a literary vision of his future, one he described to his mother in a letter: “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular, an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom…[one who could] produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic”  A mighty lofty vision for a young man who then carved that future for the rest of his writing life.

Begley’s writing itself is superb with the biography reading like a novel, integrating his observations, bolstering them from Updike’s own fiction.  Consider just this one passage: “…Mary’s knack of keeping her husband at a distance, her studiously unruffled passivity – leavened by dry humor, bolstered by tenacious dignity, and sealed with maturing beauty – helped to hold the marriage together.  Like many of his damaged fictional couples, they ‘hunkered down in embattled, recriminatory renewal of their vows, mixed with spells of humorous weariness.’”  Between his own elegant writing, and plentiful quotes, Begley has managed to create a verisimilitude approaching a virtual hologram of Updike’s life.

In reading this work, I accumulated six single spaced pages of notes and in reviewing them, realized it would be silly to go into detail on all.  I’d end up practically reprinting the essence of Begley’s extraordinary biography and as such I’ve omitted so many other issues that “made Updike run” and many of the controversies.  My heartfelt suggestion: read the biography! 

In some ways this was a difficult one for me to read. We all have a favorite writer, but I also thought of Updike as a distant friend, a one way relationship of course, but an intimate one.  His passing was a loss to me. We had so many commonalities as well, his being almost exactly ten years older than I, with a number of uncanny things in common (I don’t mean to compare myself to him in any way however).  We lived through the same eras.  What he wrote about I experienced.

Towards the end of his life, he gave a talk at the National Booksellers Association in 2006 entitled “The End of Authorship” – a defense of the printed word in which he felt threatened by Google’s attempt to digitize, well, everything.  He loved the texture of the book as I do.  As Begley recounts, “Updike saw [the universal digitized library] as ruin for writers dependent on royalties.  Defending not only the economic model that had sustained him but his fundamental conception of literature, which he understood to be a private, silent communication between two individuals, author and reader, he was arguing for ‘accountability and intimacy.’….His identity was forged in solitary communion with an open book.” 

His was a life of productivity and meaning, and now immortality, a writer who will be read for generations.  We would all like to be remembered.  It was his intention, even as a young man, to achieve exactly what he achieved (and he did it through assiduously hard work, not to mention having a pure genius for writing).  How many of us can say that?  My life in publishing was something I loved, but now that is gone, receding in my retirement years to the point I sometimes wonder whether it was a dream and what exactly did I accomplish?  Reading Begley’s acknowledgments I was heartened that he gave attribution to Jack De Bellis:  “Without the herculean efforts of Jack De Bellis, a tireless collector of Updike facts and Updike treasure, all Updike scholars would have to work twice as hard as they do.”  I cite this as at the end of my publishing career my company published his John Updike Encyclopedia. Before that we published his John Updike, 1967-1993: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Updike reviewed the chronology for the former and wrote an introduction for the latter.  So the circle closes for me.  Books matter, great literature captures life better than any compilation of digital photographs, and Updike’s works will be read and studied by generations and generations to follow.

When Updike died in early 2009, I wrote a piece which perhaps puts my feelings expressed above in context. A few months later, at the bottom of this entry I quoted his poem “Perfection Wasted,” quintessential Updike, displaying his playful, satiric side, as well as his endless ruminations about death.

He was a fine poet, a part of his work so often overlooked.  It is when he turned most inward.  So I conclude this entry by quoting his “Enemies of a House,” still another commonality as I’ve done battle with New England homes as he, and I’m fascinated by how he turns the poem describing the despoliation of an old house into the universality of the end of a life.

Enemies of a House

By John Updike

Dry rot intruding where the wood is wet;

       hot sun that shrinks roof shingles so they leak

and backs pane-putty into crumbs, the pet

       retriever at the frail screen door; the meek

small mice who find their way between the walls

      and gnaw improvements to their nests: mildew

in the cellar, at the attic window, squalls;

      loosening mortar, desiccated glue;

ice backup over eaves; wood gutters full

      of leaves each fall and catkins every spring;

                 salt air, whose soft persistent breath

turns iron red, brass brown, and copper dull;

      voracious ivy; frost heaves; splintering;

                 carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death

His was indeed a life well led as documented by Adam Begley in this inspired biography.

Reprieve

We've gone through a week of hell, a slight cough precipitating an X-Ray which revealed, as I had expected, an old pleurisy scar from my college days.  But that is just the beginning.

Ah, those college days when we thought time was a personal continuum, guaranteed to last forever, and so we did whatever we liked, reckless things at times.  I was studying for finals in my Sophomore year and the dormitory was ablaze with late night studying, frequently with the help of NoDoze, strong coffee (or caffeinated tea in my case) and a cigarette burning from my lips or ashtray.  We were on a caffeine induced self-perpetuating high -- a contest of how long we could stay up, and memorize for those tests, walking around like zombies and proud of it.

After finals I collapsed and developed pleurisy -- in fact a very serious case -- and I was brought over to the Brooklyn Hospital, put in a ward with some twenty other patients, and had a female pulmonologist assigned to me (unusual in those days).  I never forgot her name as I found it almost comical: Dr. LafLoofy.  She tested me for, among other things, Tuberculosis, and suspected I had some form of it, but never confirmed though.  But the pleurisy was her main concern as I could hardly breathe and the pain was almost intolerable.  I was given dosages of antibiotics or penicillin, vintage 1960's, and they were even considering drilling a hole in my back to extract fluid, but it never came to that.  The worst pain came from coughing or laughing.  Visitors were told not to make me laugh and all would arrive with such somber faces that I would immediately burst out laughing, then howl with pain, as they quickly but still somberly retreated.  No more visitors for me.

So I spent two weeks in the ward, while the medications did their job.  My companion most of the time was Theodore Dreiser's "Cooperwood Trilogy."  It seemed like such a perfect piece of literary work to consume during my infirmary.

When I finally emerged from the hospital, I swore off all-nighters, took a little better care of myself, but I was right back smoking, and continued to smoke a pack to a pack and a half for the next 13 years.  I had smoked three years before, so that's 16 years of smoking plus both my parents smoked and our house and car were always a blue haze of smoke.  Those were simply the days when everyone smoked.

Fast forward to this past week.  So, when my slight cough could not be explained, my Internist took an X-Ray which to no one's surprise revealed that old pleurisy scar from a half century before.  That being explained, he put me on an antibiotic, but the following morning he called me to say that he decided to compare my current X-ray to one taken two years ago as a precaution. He thought he saw a change in that scar and thus a CAT Scan was ordered.  He called the next day with scary results; I had an 18x18x23mm mass in the upper left lobe, partially calcified.  This was completely unrelated to my pleurisy scar, so it was considered an "incidental finding."  I was referred to one of the top thoracic surgeons in the area.  We were stunned.

The anxiety level for me and my wife started to go off the scale.  I probably spent most of that day on the Web reviewing the sad, gory details about lung cancer, something with which I was already familiar as one of my best friends, Howard, died of the disease at only 62 and I know what he went through.  It has to be one of the worst cancer deaths, surgery, radiation, and chemo, mostly ending in limited life spans.  What's the point I thought?

The first appointment I could get with the surgeon was not until the following Tuesday, a wait of four nerve wracking days.  Before all this began, Ann had already left to attend a Jane Austen Society of North America convention in Minneapolis, where I insisted she stay, so I was alone for those four days to do more research which only resulted in more anxiety and the need for accepting whatever fate was about to throw at me. 

It occurred to me that as I handle all investments and bill paying, running the house, my poor wife could be left with a quagmire so I spent a good part of this time, piecing things together, trying to put together a coherent document for her.  In effect, I was doing that hackneyed phrase of "getting my affairs in order."  I was preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, but getting done now what I might not be able to once operations and/or treatments began.  I even reviewed our Trust documents, found questions regarding that, and made a list to discuss with the firm that would become the trustee.  Luckily, friends were around to have dinner with, so there was some diversionary activity, but when I returned to the quiet house at night, dark thoughts interceded.

Finally, Ann returned home last Monday night and so, together, began a week of Doctors' visits, testing, and anxiety.  The surgeon reviewed the Cat Scan with us and was brutally frank in his assessment: it most definitely appears to be cancerous and because of its location and my prior thoracic battle with open heartsurgery, made it unlikely that I would survive the "gold standard" surgical operation of removing the mass.  His recommendation was the "Cyberknife" alternative, a remarkably non-invasive method of "cutting" out the tumor with high dosages of radiation that are aimed directly at the tumor from multiple angles. 

I wondered why everyone would not opt for that treatment, but I suppose the gold standard of surgical removal is "gold" for a good reason.  He explained that when a needle biopsy is done through my back and into the lung, the radiologist would leave a fiducal marker which would be used as a target for the radiation treatment.  As anyone can imagine, we left his office reeling with fear and dread.

First, though, he ordered a PET Scan which I had to prepare for, hoping that it would not reveal any other cancers in my body.  Preparation included not eating any foods with carbs or sugars the day before and then fasting the day of the procedure. The afternoon of the PET Scan I was injected with radioactive isotopes (with their caution that I can't be near children or small pets for six hours afterwards because I would be emitting radiation).  After injection, I had to go into a dark "quiet room" so the radioisotopes could be fully absorbed by my body.  Nearly an hour later, I was led into a room with a long, narrow tube where a full body PET scan and CT was  performed, and had to lie perfectly still in this confined space for a half an hour.  Given what I was likely to go through afterwards during the next several weeks, I thought this a piece of cake.

The following morning, we had to pick up the PET Scan (all images on a disk of course) as well as a radiologist's written report to give to my surgeon with whom we had an appointment only 20 minutes later.  Naturally, we opened the report in the car beforehand, looking for any sign of malignancies elsewhere in my body.  Hooray, there appeared to be none, but reference of course was made to the tumor in my upper left lobe.

So, we arrived at the surgeon's with a list of questions regarding the biopsy, the need for a marker (collapsed lung is frequently the consequence of fiducial markers), the timing of all of this (Ann had a trip to Africa planned which she was planning to cancel that very day), when treatments would begin, the required follow-ups, and of course the prognosis.

When the surgeon and his nurse entered the room, I told him we had peeked at the report, was thrilled there was nothing else, and then started to ask him about the biopsy.  He said, what biopsy, the tumor is benign, that the Pet Scan clearly showed that.  We were stunned.  What?  Huh?  No, he said, the scan showed there were no active cancers.  We had won the lottery he was glad to report (no apologies about his prior certainty that it was cancerous).  Unfortunately, we did not recognize the "doctor speak" when reading the PET Scan report. Phrases referring to the mass --- such as "this is grossly stable; no abnormal uptake is identified" were key, identifying no active cancer, no need for a biopsy at this stage, and only a CAT Scan follow up in 6 months. The tumor might be an old TB granuloma (my speculation), and if so the likelihood that it will become active after all these years is slim to none.

We left his office both stunned and elated, hugging and dancing in the parking lot of the medical office, shocked at this totally unexpected piece of good news.  But the whole experience left me with renewed appreciation of the struggles of any cancer patient and I remember friends such as Peter, Lindy, and Howard, all of whom died of the disease, and of course my own father who had perhaps the worst, pancreatic cancer.  My friend Jeremy (one of Peter's sons) had pancreatic cancer but it was the type that could be addressed by the radical Whipple surgery.  He went through hell, and as a relatively young man, but survived.  It was the same kind of pancreatic cancer Steve Jobs had but who, instead, chose a naturopathic route.

Luckily, we hadn't told the world about the "fact" that I had lung cancer.  We wanted more details from the biopsy first. Nevertheless there were a handful of friends, and of course our sons, who knew what we were going through.  Support is such an essential element in facing this dreaded disease so we thought we would bring a few into our beginning nightmare.  To those we involved in this tale early on, thank you for your emotional support, and we're sorry you, too, were taken on such a distressing emotional ride.

I had but a brief glimpse into the emotional path cancer patients have to walk -- into a void of fear and unknowns that the medical community might be inured to, but not the patients and their loved ones.  I was certain I had read something very profound on that very topic and discovered that a few years ago I had already quoted it in my blog, but it bears repeating here.  It was written by John Updike in his Widows of Eastwick, towards the end of his own life and only one who has walked the walk could have written this (in the novel, Jim has cancer): Jim's illness drove her [Alexandra] and Jim down from safe, arty Taos into the wider society, the valleys of the ailing, a vast herd moving like stampeded bison toward the killing cliff. The socialization forced upon her -- interviews with doctors, most of them unsettlingly young; encounters with nurses, demanded merciful attentions the hospitalized patient was too manly and depressed to ask for himself; commiseration with others in her condition, soon-to-be widows and widowers she would have shunned on the street but now, in these antiseptic hallways, embraced with shared tears -- prepared her for travel in the company of strangers

Briefly I had thought that was to be my own fate, and, just as worse, Ann's, but thankfully not yet.

Saturday

Perhaps I am one of the last readers to discover Ian McEwan's Saturday, originally published some eight years ago.  In my defense, the book has been sitting in my reading queue for some time --  the Jonathan Cape paperback edition -- and I finally picked it up and said it was about time I turn to an English novelist and temporarily abandon my preference for American literature, having heard so much praise about McEwan's work. (As a disclaimer, I had not read his best known work, Atonement, before it was made into a movie -- which I also have not seen, hoping to read the book first, but Saturday was already on my shelves by then.)

As I am so late to the McEwan party, it doesn't make sense to try to write a formal book review of the book -- there are so many online.  But a brief summary might be useful.  The protagonist, Henry Perowne is a very successful neurosurgeon, married to Rosalind who is an attorney for a newspaper.  They have two children, both young adults, Daisy, a soon to be a published poet (like her maternal Grandfather) and Theo, a talented blues musician.  All the action of the novel (mostly told as interior monologue) takes place on a Saturday (actually into early Sunday morning).  It begins with Henry's early morning awakening, his watching the square over which his home looms, his thoughts about surgeries, past and future, and then finally noticing a plane, partially in flames, seemingly descending on London or perhaps trying to land at Heathrow.  This is post 9/11, that early morning scene setting the tone for the entire novel, a sense of impending doom.  Other things happen that day -- a mass demonstration protesting the, then, possible invasion of Iraq, a game of squash with Henry's highly competitive colleague, Strauss, for which he is delayed because of the demonstration and also because his Mercedes has had a run in with a BMW, occupied by a bunch of thugs, (the ring leader, Baxter, reminding me a little of a young Edward G. Robinson). Baxter is the catalyst for action later in the novel.  It certainly changes Henry's day, although the novel almost ends as it began, making a full circle. McEwan's writing is in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, with some of the darkness of Joseph Conrad. 

McEwan is as precise in his construction of the novel as is Perowne in the operating theatre, the place Perowne thinks of as "home" as much as the one on Fitzroy Square where he lives with his wife and son (Daisy has already gone, but as part of the plot, is coming home to London that Saturday as her book of poetry is about to be published). 

Interestingly, Henry is juxtaposed to his daughter and her Grandfather, both poets, and to a lesser degree, to his son, Theo, the musician.  He is a surgeon, one who believes in scientific inquiry, and although he appreciates classical music in the operating theatre, and jazz figures such as Bill Evans, Henry is first and foremost a man of science. 

I am going to quote several passages from the novel as they give not only a sense of McEwan's exceptional writing style, but they reveal some of the major themes as well.  I mentioned that the novel unfolds in the shadow of 9/11, beginning with a possible airliner crash, perhaps an accident, or a terrorist act.  McEwan writes about Henry's feelings on air travel: Like most passengers, outwardly subdued by the monotony of air travel, he often lets his thoughts range across the possibilities while sitting, strapped down and docile, in front of a packaged meal. Outside, beyond a wall of thin steel and cheerful creaking plastic, it's minus sixty degrees and forty thousand feet to the ground. Flung across the Atlantic at five hundred feet a second, you submit to the folly because everyone else does. Your fellow passengers are reassured because you and the others around you appear calm....Air travel is a stock market, a trick of mirrored perceptions, a fragile alliance of pooled belief; so long as nerves hold steady and no bombs or wreckers are on board, everybody prospers. When there's failure....[t]he market could plunge.

And what about a deity's role in all of this? And if there are to be deaths, the very god who ordained them will soon be funereally petitioned for comfort. Perowne regards this as a matter for wonder, a human complication beyond the reach of morals. From it there spring, alongside the unreason and slaughter, decent people and good deeds, beautiful cathedrals, mosques, cantatas, poetry. Even the denial of God, he was once amazed and indignant to hear a priest argue, is a spiritual exercise, a form of prayer: it's not easy to escape from the clutches of the believers.

He is constantly debating his daughter and his father in law about the role of literature and poetry in the real world, particularly the literary supernatural that seems to perpetually occupy the best selling lists.  His daughter has given him a "reading list" of novels, but Henry protests: A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain -- consciousness, no less.  It isn't an article of faith with him, he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs.  If that's worthy of awe, it also deserves curiosity; the actual, not the magical, should be the challenge.  This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.

'No more magic midget drummers,' he pleaded with her by post, after setting out his tirade. 'Please, no more ghosts, angels, satins or metamorphoses. When anything can happen, nothing much matters. It's all kitsch to me.'

'You ninny,' she reproved him on a postcard, 'you Gradgrind. It's literature, not physics!'  They had never conducted one of their frequent arguments by post before. He wrote back: 'Tell that to your Flaubert and Tolstoy. Not a single winged human between them!'

Then there are times McEwan seems to be influenced by social Darwinism reminding me a little of Theodore Dreiser.  Here, Perowne is negotiating his car through the left over rubbish from the march, and he sees a street sweeper and their eyes briefly meet: The whites of the sweeper's eyes are fringed with egg-yellow shading to red along the lids. For a vertiginous moment Henry feels himself bound to the other man, as though on a seesaw with him, pinned to an axis that could tip them into each other's life.....How restful it must once have been, in another age, to be prosperous and believe that an all-knowing supernatural force had allotted people to their stations in life. And not see how the belief served your own prosperity - a form of anosognosia, a useful psychiatric term for a lack of awareness of one's own condition. Now we think we do see, how do things stand? After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth. No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view - having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. It's not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist.

His eye for the common street sweeper is later turned to the fishmonger and McEwan weaves a philosophical observation into his observation: The fishmonger is a polite, studious man who treats his customers as members of an exclusive branch of the landed gentry. He wraps each species of fish in several pages of a newspaper. This is the kind of question Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him.

And then, he turns to humanity in general.  Henry is now stuck in traffic, the late aftermath of the march.  Does he become irate, frustrated by the traffic?  No, he is transported to a breathtaking view from a historical perspective: Dense traffic is heading into the city for Saturday night pleasures just as the first wave of coaches is bringing the marchers out.  During the long crawl towards the lights at Gypsy Corner, he lowers his window to taste the scene in full - the bovine patience of a jam, the abrasive tang of icy fumes, the thunderous idling machinery in six lanes east and west, the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork, the jaunty thud of entertainment systems, and red taillights stretching way ahead into the city, white headlights pouring out of it. He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented wealth of masses at serious play in the unforgiving modem city makes for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people! Rivers of light! He wants to make himself see it as Newton might, or his contemporaries, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Willis - those clever, curious men of the English Enlightenment who for a few years held in their minds nearly all the world's science. Surely, they would be awed. Mentally, he shows it off to them: this is what we've done, this is commonplace in our time. All this teeming illumination would be wondrous if he could only see it through their eyes.

Back in the operating theatre (now late Saturday night), Henry's awe of science, the brain he is operating on, and what does consciousness mean, all converge: He's looking down at a portion of Baxter's brain. He can easily convince himself that it's familiar territory, a kind of homeland, with its low hills and enfolded valleys of the sulci, each with a name and imputed function, as known to him as his own house. Just to the left of the mid-line, running laterally away out of sight under the bone, is the motor strip. Behind it, running parallel, is the sensory strip. So easy to damage, with such terrible, lifelong consequences. How much time he has spent making routes to avoid these areas, like bad neighbourhoods in an American city. And this familiarity numbs him daily to the extent of his ignorance, and of the general ignorance. For all the recent advances, it's still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells actually encodes information, how it holds experiences, memories, dreams and intentions. He doesn't doubt that in years to come, the coding mechanism will be known, though it might not be in his lifetime. Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre.  Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

One of my favorite, very poignant passages, probably because it touches me very directly, my mother-in-law, uncle, and now our cousin, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, involves Henry's mother, Lily, who he visits (same Saturday!) at the home she is being cared for -- with advance stages of that dreaded disease.  Henry remembers when they had to take her from her home, the very one he grew up in, as she could no longer care for herself and in fact was failing to recognize family members.  He enlists the help of his wife and his children: The family packed up clothes and kitchenware and unwanted ornaments for the charity shops - Henry never realised before how these places lived off the dead. Everything else they stuffed into bin liners and put out for the rubbish collection. They worked in silence, like looters - having the radio on wasn't appropriate. It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence.

They were striking the set of a play, a humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room - his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts - without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

I don't think I've given away any significant plot details that will ruin one's reading of this novel of suspense.  I mentioned earlier that the novel remains in the shadow of 9/11 and it circles back to the beginning at the end.  Henry now thinks what the future might bring, by thinking of what the past was like --as the future might have been seen through the eyes of a physician such as himself, one hundred years ago.  It is a powerful message brilliantly expressed, one of foreboding by McEwan: London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash - twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital's Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack's inevitable. He lives in different times - because the news-papers say so doesn't mean it isn't true. But from the top of his day, this is a future that's harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities. A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter's dawn, might have pondered the new century's future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn't yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor - an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace - would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a passing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange.

My blog entry immediately before this one made note that Saturdays will never be the same without my favorite financial writer who recently passed, Alan Abelson.  Inevitably I will think of this novel on some future Saturdays as well, hoping that it is not in the context of a "mass killing," but that specter of terrorism hangs heavily.  In his own post 9/11 novel, The Terrorist, John Updike struggled to reconcile the fundamentalist Muslim view of American society and what the future might hold.  Both novels leave one with the ambiguities of an unknown resolution. Both are novels of peerless writing.