Robinson and Updike: Houses, Domesticity, and the Numinous Quotidian
James Schiff
Abstract
In this exploratory essay, I examine Robinson’s and Updike’s shared interests in the domestic and the mundane, in Christian theology and the life of ministers, and in the development of prose styles that combine realism and a sense of transcendence. I con- clude with three brief points of textual comparison between the authors, the first two highlighting differences, and the third revealing a substantive convergence. The first comparison pertains to the two authors’ respective efforts, in A Month of Sundays and Gilead, to compose a novel limning the personal reflections of a Protestant minister. Robinson’s Housekeeping and Updike’s Witches of Eastwick provide a second point of textual comparison, showing the notable differences in their depiction of a close net- work of women. For the third point of comparison, I turn to Updike’s 1990 short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” and Robinson’s Home, in which the imaginative visions of the two authors converge most closely, each giving home a substantive weight and central importance.
At first glance, Marilynne Robinson and John Updike seem a strange pairing. Updike was prolific and voluble, publishing sixty-five volumes, more than one book per year, including not only novels but more than a thousand short sto- ries, poems, reviews, and essays. Martin Amis once referred to him as “a psy- chotic Santa of volubility,” and David Foster Wallace claims a young female reader complained, “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” (12, 52). In contrast, Robinson for decades was known primarily as the author of a single distinguished and peculiar novel marked, among other things, by its reticence. As for his fiction, Updike was chock full of male sexual desire, explicit in his description of the body while limning philandering protagonists driven by erotic urgings. Roger Lambert of Updike’s Roger’s Version creates graphic pornographic fantasies about his wife and her ostensible young lover. In contrast, sexuality is seldom mentioned in Robinson’s novels, at least directly, and there is good mannered tact when discussing transgressive behav- ior. In Robinson’s fiction, we have virtually no idea what kind of sexual thoughts occur to Glory Boughton (Home) or Ruth (Housekeeping). There are other notable differences between the two writers: Robinson’s mothers are absent,
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Updike’s are domineering; heterosexual coupling is a point of focus in Updike while the failures of coupling generally take place offstage in Robinson, keep- ing the focus instead on the larger family. It is hardly surprising, then, that Updike, who has been studied alongside a range of other writers (Hawthorne, Howells, James, Salinger, Cheever, and Roth) has not previously been linked to Robinson, who is most often associated with canonical nineteenth century American writers, such as Melville, Emerson, and Dickinson. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, significant points of similarity emerge between Robinson and Updike, such that it becomes worthwhile to explore these over- looked similarities and pursue a comparative analysis of writing that has spo- ken to very different audiences. First, both writers are immensely interested in the home, family, and domestic quotidian. Most of the scenes in Robinson’s first three novels, two of which carry explicitly domestic titles (Housekeeping, Home), revolve around a single household and depict the evolving daily rela- tionships between those who reside within. For Updike, who also titled a novel Home (it was his first full-length novel, though never published),1 the depic- tion of the American quotidian domestic was a life-long project. As he explained, “[s]omething quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is” (Howard 11). Updike’s objective, as he put it, was “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (The Early Stories xv). In comparison to other writers, relatively little happens in the fiction of Robinson and Updike, and what does happen largely involves familial relationships. In addition, both Robinson and Updike have a deep and ranging interest in religion, particularly Christianity, which figures prominently in their work. Both authors have written novels that purport to be the diaries or reflections of a minister: Updike’s A Month of Sundays and Robinson’s Gilead; both have composed essays on theology and theologians (Kierkegaard and Barth for Updike; Calvin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Robinson); and both have depicted the ways in which God’s presence can be felt in daily domestic life. Through their interest in both the quotidian and divine, Robinson and Updike proffer a mode of writing that separates their work from that of so many contempo- raries, such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Finally, Robinson and Updike are recognized as major stylists, each having developed a singular mode of expression particularly well-suited to depicting
1 Updike completed a draft of a six-hundred page autobiographical novel, titled Home, in 1956. The novel was rejected in 1957 by Harper & Brothers, his initial publisher, and he quickly began work on The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which would become his first published novel.