Sliding Seaward

By John Skow

MUSEUMS AND WOMEN AND OTHER STORIES by JOHN UPDIKE 282 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

It seems a bit graceless to complain at this stage (his 41st year, his 19th book) about a writer as gifted and giving as John Updike. He has produced a body of writing whose size and consistent high quality are unapproached by the work of any American writer near his age, except Norman Mailer. It is hard to imagine how John Updike could have managed the business of being John Updike any more faithfully.

Yet it is hard to give him the last measure of commitment--and even love--that a passionate reader gives to a very few writers: (let's say) Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Twain, Melville, Yeats, Crane and yesbygod Hemingway. Is it Updike's faint tinge of smugness? Is he too much a cherisher of clever conceits? The reasons seem murkier the more they are examined, but they refuse to be examined away. What stirs these grumbles this time is the author's new collection of short stories. The book also stirs, of course, all of the old admiration: Lord, how well the man writes.

A couple of pieces in Museums seem to have been included to show the author's versatility. One is a whimsy about a group of one-celled pond-water creatures attending a cocktail party. Thurber could do this sort of thing well. Updike can't; except for Bech, a Book, his humor rarely breaks loose from cleverness. For the rest, there is a series of short stories about one of Updike's condescended-to suburban couples, called (smugly) the Maples. The first is very good indeed. It concerns Dick Maple's wobbly, not very creditable reactions when his wife escapes their nest by joining the civil rights movement.

Two unrelated stories are superb. The more striking of these, called The Millies, is the best piece of short fiction in some time. Updike has captured the hostility between culture and counterculture in the U.S., complete and entire, in about eight pages. He tells of an unbuilt, rocky hill in the center of Tarbox, his fictional Massachusetts town. There the young of the town begin roosting in a large untidy flock. They do very little; smoke some pot, drink a little beer, look down silently and passively on the activity of Main Street. The passivity, the looking-down, the doing-very-little first alarm and then enrage the citizens of Tarbox. Editorials are written, letters sent to the editor. Undirected manias find a focus. The town's self-respect is felt to be eroding. "People are bringing the shutters down from their attics and putting them back on their windows," Updike writes. His story ends: "The downtown seems to be tightening like a fist, a glistening clot of apoplectic signs and sunstruck stalled automobiles. And the Hillies are slowly withdrawing upward. ..They are getting ready for our attack."

The other memorable story, When Everybody Was Pregnant, celebrates the '50s -- Updike's time. A stockbroker on a commuting train muses (in the way a stockbroker would if he were John Updike) about the distant, incredible time of young parenthood. "Did the '50s exist?" he wonders. "Voluptuous wall paper. Crazy kids. Sickening sensations of love. The trains slide forward. The decades slide seaward, taking us along.

I am still afraid. Still grateful."

That is the feeling Updike leaves, the best of it. And, peace, the grum bling reader is also grateful.

. John Skow

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