The average despair
Friends with benefits — that's what we are, John Updike and I, since last Monday. If we must talk about love, that was and is between me and William Styron because of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Darkness Visible. From Updike, I have just read The Poorhouse Fair before, and I began Roger`s Version. I liked the first one, but not very much. "He can write", I said to me in a quite arrogant, but also honest way.
Last Monday it was Easter and I saw on somebody`s bookshelf S., and that book just appealed to me. I borrowed it and I liked it very much. First of all because it is an epistolary novel which is very rare this days. Second, because Sarah Worth is an unhappy woman and somehow I fancy unhappiness, in literature I do anyway. Third, Sarah is very intelligent and strong-minded, and although she is very clever, she wants to be happy so much that she can`t notice the most obvious connery. And last but not least I liked S. because of its perfect structure and marvellous characters. Like any great writer, Updike knows everything about life, still, he doesn`t know anything before or beyond Sarah. How can I explain this? He understands a lot, but he isn't argumentative.
Sarah, who looks for happiness in Ashram Arhat, a religious community, must understand and experience that happiness isn`t available like a dentist who is waiting for you: you can`t build it, just hope for it. Therefore S. is a melancholy, even desperate novel. It includes a great and average despair, if I may say so, like The Killers by Hemingway or Cheap in August by Graham Greene.
It isn`t love yet, but it can be.
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