Man in the middle

John Updike is given his due

DUE CONSIDERATIONS. By John Updike. Knopf. 703 pages. $40.

Virginia Woolf, one of the great novelist/critics, wrote, "To know whom to write for is to know how to write."

Woolf settled on an audience that she tagged "the common reader": the smart nonspecialist who expects to be entertained by literature. John Updike, another great novelist and critic whose sixth volume of nonfiction pieces, "Due Considerations," is just published, writes for his own brand of common reader. Updike sees himself as the quintessential man in the middle (middle class, small town, Protestant). It is, he says, in middles that "ambiguity restlessly rules."

From his perch at the center, Updike pivots between high and low enthusiasms. He's a voracious sampler, greedy to snatch at the world's beauty before it's gone. In the final sentences of the preface, Updike admits that he wants to offer the testimony of one witness (himself) to another, the reader, of the "basic miracles of existence." He concludes, "Not only the devil should be given his due."

If his is an autumnal attitude — Updike often mentions his affiliation with the past — it springs from a saucy, idiosyncratic mind that shows no signs of flagging power. Aside from the dazzling range of his interests and the ease of his erudition, Updike is also gifted with a memory that puts him in touch with all the moments of his now-long life. The Depression-era boy who won a grinning Mickey Mouse piggy bank in the third-grade spelling bee — the clinching word was "lonely" — is still here, along with the divorcing husband who left his first marriage in a "lime-colored mustang convertible," a racy little signifier of "American pizazz." In two sections titled "General Considerations" and "Private Considerations," Updike collects incidental pieces that showcase his charm and wit. Many of these pieces generously answer commissioned questions, among them: books that comfort him (Shakespeare), his literary masters (Marcel Proust and Henry Green), his favorite year of the last century (1946, when "nothing much happened ... which was the beauty and wonder of it"), his first job (swatting flies 10 for a penny on his family's side porch) and his favorite among his own stories ("Your Lover Just Called"). Two unlikely masterpieces in the batch make connections between the material world and the world of our fantasies. Reminiscing about the tactile magic of coins in "A Sense of Change," Updike moves on to calculations of real value and how we measure it. "The Cars of My Life" sings a hymn to said cars, beginning with a Waterfall Blue Ford sedan, but ends up celebrating the life itself: "I am proud of all my miles."

Updike's versatile intellect gets full play when he writes about artists, both visual and literary. Again and again, he hits a nerve. J.M. Coetzee's paragraphs, for instance, "feel sharply pruned, at times as brutally disciplined as Parisian lime trees." Philip Larkin's poems have a "severe purity." Peter Carey's plots "unfold like scenes on a fragile paper fan." Like his character Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike knows what it is to be first rate. His tender skill gives due consideration to everything it touches.