Marry Me by John Updike

Breath left her; she felt the skin of her face as one wall of a sealed chamber bounded by the brown ledge holding the pennies, the low violet clouds against which the elm’s twigs showed pale, the rectangle of glass slashed by raindrops. Jerry’s voice called, ‘Hey?’

As you can see from the quote above, John Updike rather has a way with words and can easily turn even descriptions of mundane, everyday activities into beautiful paragraphs that scream to be excerpted and put into posts like this. So it is really a crapshoot in an Updike novel (Confession: I’ve actually only read this one, but it’s a safe presumption) to find passages like the one above and the one from Jon’s The Music School review. He certainly has a superior command of the English language and, as Jon noted, intricate precision is the adorned result. However, as Jon noted as well, Updike was once described as a major stylist and a minor novelist, and sadly that seems to fit the bill for this book.

It has a brilliant start as we are introduced to Jerry and Sally, who are in love, but goshdarnit, they also happen to be married to other people. Their affair takes a typical path, and Sally seems to be more invested in it while Jerry still appears to love his wife, Ruth, as well. But then the pair decides to let the cat out of the bag and tell Ruth but leave Richard, Sally’s husband, in the dark. This is where the book becomes quixotic and the characters much less likable. The nature of the divorce conversation is one of small talk over coffee yet it doesn’t lack indifference. It’s hard to explain this part and perhaps this is to show just how capricious our hearts can be; but it still all seems very unlikely that something of this consequence could be talked of lightly while both parties still say they love each other. For instance, Jerry in one moment will be talking candidly and genuinely to Ruth of his true love for Sally, but in a disrespectful way, to which Ruth, in rightful rage, will tell him to get out. The next moment Jerry will kiss his wife after telling her of his feelings for another woman and his wife will let him pathetically kiss her a second time even though she couldn’t be angrier. Behaviors in this book weren’t consistent with my views of reality. Again, perhaps Updike was intent on showing how unpredictable our hearts can be but on the surface level the plot was weak—the idea is there but its execution proves not very gripping. Furthermore the four characters couldn’t be more craven, arbitrary cowards. On a brighter note, it had a nice ending and I think the last chapter was exceptional—a perfectly tied bow on a perfectly wrapped package despite there being, at least for me, not much inside.

Regardless of my qualms with the plot, I can’t say I didn’t like this book. Even with not much substance, Updike’s writing can carry any moment and it is a pleasure to read. If you find writing like this, writing that’s prose begging to be poetry, then look no further than Mr. Updike; however, I can easily see how flowery sentences can be excessive to some people so be warned. I’m looking forward to reading the Rabbit books sometime soon, which aren’t supposed to have much plot, but this isn’t usually a problem for me. I just like for the characters to not be, without explanation, completely irrational, and all of Updike’s characters I’ve encountered (in his short stories) have been rational in their context until this book. I’ll give it a 6.5 of 10.