AMERICANA

In one of his new poems, Updike describes himself as “a literary Mr. Sunshine,” and the phrase is just right: Updike’s poetry, like his prose, is a species of largesse; its boundless charity hints at self-satisfaction. The title poem, a rambling paean for airports and big American beauty, is supposed to have been begun “in ballpoint, on a torn-off scrap / of airline magazine.” And many of Updike’s poems seem willfully occasional, as if focusing for too long on any subject would be to sin against the even democracy of things (many of these poems are written from airplanes, from whose windows the world looks flat). Sometimes this gratitude, stemming from Updike’s Protestant theology, carries him to comic extremes. Nothing is allowed to escape notice, everything is caught up in a tide of relentless fluency, even radiators: “Not theirs the stove’s inflammatory drama, / or the refrigerator’s frosty glamour / The room lulls our blood not by accident but / by basement-based thermodynamic plan.” So style, rising higher and higher, drowns content. Of course it is hard to resist the author’s verbal brio, his zest for contemporary gadgets, habits, and curiosities—Updike, unlike so many poets, appears admirably at home in the modern world. But the price of this comfort is complacency. In the last of this collection, Updike describes Christmas morning, any Christmas morning, where the sound of a newspaper hitting the porch signifies that “some poor devil . . . has brought to us glad tidings.”

Updike, a practiced cultural commentator, has once again brought the news. Yet it is too often the same news; its obstinately glad tidings seem too good to be true.