Preoccupation and Indecisiveness

Books are finished; reviews are piling up in the draft hopper. As I sit to write about John Updike’s Marry Me, I want to compare it to a Philip Roth book I am only half finished and to overlay my analysis of it with the insight I gained from Pamuk’s Norton lectures. I will rely on his perspective even though, dear blog reader, it might be a day or so before that review gets on the site.

As is my habit, after finishing Marry Me, I went on Wiki to see what it had to say both about Updike and about this particular novel. Wouldn’t you know, this was one of the few without a hyperlink. Wiki’s write up of Updike summarizes him as the chronicler of suburban adultery, whose novels are populated with
characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity. Well that succinctly summarizes the plot of Marry Me.

While not exactly Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, this tale deals with Jerry and Ruth (Jerry having the most Updike-like autobiographical characteristics such as being a frustrated cartoonist and married to a woman her met in art school) and Richard and Sally. Richard, a compulsive philanderer seduces Ruth but the affair fizzles out after a short fling. Jerry obsesses about Sally, for pages and pages and chapter upon chapter. He swears to Ruth that he will stop seeing her however being completely unable to do so.

Jerry and Ruth talk to much about his extramarital affair, not in heated passionate arguments, but as though they were watching Cousin/Cousine, and the damage would not affect them as a family. Ruth bides her time; Jerry waivers and cogitates. Ho hum.

The kicker of the novel comes in its last chapter, a quasi-epilogue, that has three concurrent scenarios playing out: Jerry taking Sally and her three children to Wyoming, Jerry taking Ruth and their three children to Nice, and Jerry going alone to St. Croix where he continues to fantasize about proposing to Sally. Now this device is what’s punchy and clever. Pamuk in his lectures describes why readers like reading novels: essentially, to be caught up in another familiar but somewhat unknown landscape of experiences, trying to figure out how all the details the author put into the book all fit together to bring the point of it into focus. He calls it the center of the story.

Now I disagree with Wiki that Marry Me is a tale of suburban adultery, riddled with Christian guilt. Updike seems to me to be writing about options and choices and the inability to decide. That theme is tricked out in the last chapter. Updike is playing with the reader, saying to him/her that no matter how you are trying to figure this out and tie Jerry’s life up neatly, the point of the story is Jerry can’t pick either woman and all three endings are equally real.

Besides having the opinion that no woman would be the happy winner, Jerry being no prize husband or lover, none of the three conclusions work for me. The religious compulsion is best expressed when Jerry thinks about whose face he wants to see above his as he lays dying. Neither Ruth nor Sally seem right to me; maybe a mirror to reflect his face back to him as someone checks to see if he is still breathing after yet another asthma attack.