More Matter: Essays and Criticism By John Updike Alfred A. Knopf, $35 ISBN 0375406301 Review by Roger Bishop John Updike is one of our most respected and honored, as well as prolific, novelists and short story writers. He also has published several volumes of poetry. But, he says, I set out to be a magazine writer, a wordsmith as the profession was understood in the industrial first half of the century, and I like seeing my name in what they used to call Ôhard type.’ He fell in love with the New Yorker when he was a child and, for over 40 years, has been a frequent contributor. Appearing under the same Rea Irvin-designed title-type and department logos as White and Thurber and Cheever and those magical cartoons was for me a dream come true. It still is. Though he has also written for other publications, most of Updike’s nonfiction has appeared in that magazine. Every eight years or so he gathers together his periodical pieces and other occasional writings and publishes them in a book. The fifth collection, More Matter: Essays and Criticism, is, like the earlier ones, a diverse cornucopia of riches. In this, his 50th book, Updike’s wide-ranging, intellectual curiosity matched with his lucid and graceful prose make a potent combination. (An earlier such collection, Hugging the Shore, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.) A few of the many subjects discussed are: New York as reflected in American writing since 1920; the adventure of installing a burglar alarm; haircuts of different kinds (a piece that attracted more mail than any magazine writing he has ever published); the lives of Isaac Newton, Helen Keller, and Abraham Lincoln; Mickey Mouse; the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol; and appreciations of three New Yorker stalwarts who were paternally kind to me : William Shawn, Brendan Gill, and William Maxwell.

Of particular interest are Updike’s observations on writers and writing. He notes the competitive nature of the literary life, where writers eye each other with a vigorous jealousy and suspicion. They are swift to condemn and dismiss, as a means of keeping the field from getting too crowded. It does not surprise us, then, when he says: A writer, I have found, takes less comfort in being praised than in a colleague’s being panned. In reviewing a biography of Graham Greene, he generalizes: The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one. Whether the literary work under consideration is by a contemporary U.

S. or a European or South American author, or an author who wrote decades ago, Updike’s criticism is often astute and compelling. He wears his learning lightly, but he is familiar with the author’s other writings and her or his life. Although often generous with his praise, Updike can offer devastating criticism. Writing about a late work of Edith Wharton: Comedy is, perhaps, a natural mode for aged authors. The momentousness of being alive the majestic awfulness is felt most keenly by the young, and human existence comes to seem, as death nears and perspective lengthens, gossamer-light, such stuff as dreams are made on. On Edmund Wilson’s journals: The journals are not quite literature, yet they have an unpreening frankness and an energetic curiosity that stimulates our appetite for literature. Ê ÊAgain showing keen insight into the work of American writers, Updike says, . . . Faulkner, at his most eccentric and willfully windy, thought he knew what he was doing. Dreiser will never be, so muddied is his prose at the source, a model of stylistic integrity. John Updike is indeed a thoughtful wordsmith, a literary craftsman worthy to walk in the footsteps of those illustrious New Yorker writers he admired from afar many years ago. ¦ Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Last October, on the occasion of John Kenneth Galbraith’s 90th birthday, he was honored with a reception and dinner at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. At that time he was presented with a festschrift of essays by, among others, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Derek Bok, and Robert Heilbroner. That work, under the title Between Friends: Perspectives on John Kenneth Galbraith, has just been published. Through it we gain a better understanding of the person and his economic and political ideas.

To Carlos Fuentes, Galbraith is a Quixote of the Plains, an economist whose subject is no less than concrete human beings, their well-being, their health, their education, their hope . . . Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., notes that for Galbraith theory . . . is not an end in itself. Its function . . . is to explain, illuminate, and, if possible, improve the conditions of life. Politics and government in this perspective are not digressions for economists but are central to their work. John Kenneth Galbraith has been one of the most notable public intellectuals of the last 40 years, or since the publication of his still relevant book The Affluent Society. He is known for his many other books, including The New Industrial State and The Nature of Mass Poverty. In one of my favorite essays, Galbraith’s son Peter discusses how his father sought a role in the major foreign policy questions of the Kennedy administration. Contrary to the wishes of the Secretary of State, Ambassador Galbraith expressed his views directly to the President. The views, in hindsight, were good and prescient, including in particular Galbraith’s early opposition to U.

S. military involvement in Vietnam. Peter closes by noting that the greatest and most common vice of politicians and bureaucrats is cowardice. John Kenneth Galbraith is the most courageous man I have known.

Virtually since the end of World War II foreign writers have been discovering and reporting on the New Germany in books usually with that term (or the New Germans ) in the title. One of the most recent, in 1996, was The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany, by the New Yorker’s Jane Kramer, but there have been many others in preceding decades by equally notable writers, such as Alistair Horne, John Dornberg, and David Marsh.

You’d think after more than a half-century the topic, not to mention the country and its inhabitants, would have put on a few years. But no, all three are evergreen, and newer Germans keep coming along to be discovered by people like Frederick Kempe, whose Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany is a worthy successor to all those searches for now-not-so-new Germanys.

Kempe, who is the editor and associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe and founding editor of the Central European Economic Review and has covered German affairs as a journalist for 20 years, has, as his title and subtitle indicate, a stake beyond the professional in this. This personal element helps make Father/Land immensely readable. Both his mother and father were German immigrants, and in his search for the new Germany he unearths some old family skeletons.

In going through papers after the death of his father, a World War II U.

S. Army veteran who had come to the United States in 1927, the author discovers strong evidence that he was an admirer of Hitler, an anti-Semite, and a racist. A Jewish friend tells him not to magnify the significance of this, that it is little more than what was standard at the time. However, he also learns of another family member’s actions whose significance is beyond magnification.

This man, a great-uncle who remained in Germany after the war, had long been the subject of family rumors. No one knew the enormity of his monstrous acts until Kempe, by diligent poring through German archives, learned he was a vicious, sadistic Nazi thug and very probably a murderer of the Jews who came under his control. The man was never prosecuted, and he died a pious worker for the Mormon Church to which most Kempe family members belonged.

These revelations add a personal strand to what is the central thread of this book, as of all the earlier books on New Germany: the burden of guilt the country carries for the Holocaust. For various reasons Kempe believes the current generation is dealing with this burden better than their parents and grandparents did (or indeed could). He also provides a useful perspective on it by examining the position of Germany’s Turkish population.

Most thinking Germans realize that in killing its Jews, Germany killed a big part of itself. Pre-war Jews were proud of being German, fought for their country, and added distinction to its literary, musical, and scientific reputation out of proportion to their numbers. It is ironic, and not exactly nice, that some Germans now yearn for their Jews, given the Turks.

Because the Turks, who at 2.5 million far outnumber the Jews at their height, are not assimilating the way Jews did (or wanted to do). Moreover, many look for their identity not to Germany or even Turkey, but to Islam. Ironies abound: what with the touchy relationship between Islam and Jews, this leads Germans to fear that, should this Islamic trend intensify, the Jews in Germany will again not feel secure, and leave.

Overall, though, Kempe is enthusiastic and optimistic about the country’s present and future. It has adopted the American economic model, which is clearly no sin in the eyes of a writer connected with the Wall Street Journal organization, albeit most Germans prefer more of a Sozialstaat (social welfare state). It has adopted American-style democracy, though Germans fret over the stability of a borrowed political system.

And it has unquestionably adopted American ways. Unlike the French, Germans readily incorporate American English into their language. They cannot seem to get enough of American pop culture. This has gone so far as a rip-off of David Letterman’s TV show, Late Night with Harald Schmidt, right down to loony street conversations and mocking of the audience.

In other words, the Germans are becoming less German. Whether their becoming more American is as good a thing as the author seems to believe is a matter for each reader to decide.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

This is Robert D. Kaplan’s vision of America’s future: a collection of city-states where political power and decision making are concentrated locally. Rather than set broad policy and enforce law, the federal government would provide a protective shield against such hazards as global terrorists and computer hackers and supply aid such as specialized military units for floods and earthquakes. This new political arrangement is what Kaplan describes as an empire wilderness, vast, remote, decentralized. And this outlook forms the cornerstone for Kaplan’s new book, An Empire Wilderness.

It is best described as a political travelogue, one pilgrim’s impressions formed while progressing down his country’s interstates and back roads. The journey is set in the West, where Kaplan shakes his East Coast shackles and witnesses America’s still-open, still-developing vistas. He travels some of the same trails as Kerouac. But where Kerouac wrote for the Beat Generation, Kaplan writes for a Baby Boom Generation which approaches the 21st century harboring worries about old age and the future of its offspring.

Kaplan, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has established a niche for himself with this style of writing. He traveled through Bosnia and made controversial political observations in his best-selling Balkan Ghosts. And he roamed from West Africa to Central and South East Asia to pen The Ends of the Earth. In An Empire Wilderness, Kaplan visits such places as Fort Levenworth, Kansas, Orange County, California, Tucson, Arizona, Nogales, Mexico, and Vancouver, Canada, developing some intriguing insights into America’s future: Foreign policy will, over the decades, be increasingly influenced by the military, as war, peacekeeping, famine relief, and the like grow too technical and complex for civilian managers to control. Despite attempts to curb the number of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, large scale immigration may have to continue, if for no other reason than to provide an army of younger workers to support America’s retirees. Efforts to revive decaying urban downtowns are threatened by suburbanization and computerization. No one needs to go [downtown] to shop, see a movie, or go to a fancy restaurant. And the residents can be hooked up to the world from their homes. Thus, the essence of An Empire Wilderness is a glimpse at a horizon that Kaplan sees as neither too bright, nor too bleak. Recalling Rome, Athens, and other empires that have risen and fallen, Kaplan somewhat cryptically predicts that the changes being experienced in America are part of an evolution toward finality. The next passage will be our most difficult as a nation, he writes, and it will be our last. John T. Slania is a writer in Chicago, Illinois.

Wallace Stegner, who died in 1993, is frequently referred to as the dean of the new American West writers. In the world of serious writers, the term dean can often be a form of damning with faint praise, meaning that one was an important early contributor to a movement but perhaps not its best example, not its apogee. Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West demonstrates that the term is both positive and deserved. Edited by Stegner’s son Page, this anthology both defines in nonfiction what the North American West was and is with the mythology stripped away and provides excellent examples of some its best fiction. It also proffers examples of the harsh, unromantic life of the cowboy who, in Stegner’s view, is a poorly paid agricultural worker whose one inviolate dictum is that the well-being of his animals comes first. Stegner fought a lifelong battle with the myth of the American cowboy which, he admitted, he lost. Stegner was not, however, a mere cowboy writer not by any means. Among his 30-some books are important works on conservation and the environment. Stegner’s west is a big dry place; aridity is common to most of what he calls the West as he explains in an essay called Living Dry. Understandably then, the wise and equitable use of water was one of his major concerns. And in a larger sense, Stegner’s famous Wilderness Letter remains one of the environmental movement’s most eloquent statements.

Stegner was also a teacher, an academic at some of the nation’s best universities. As a young man, he attended the University of Iowa, the site of America’s first and finest creative writers’ program. In 1964, he founded the nation’s second great writers’ program at Stanford University where he taught until 1971. Among his students were Ken Kesey (who claimed to dislike him), Wendell Barry, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, and Robert Haas to mention a few who credit much of their development to Stegner’s tutelage. Abbey once called him the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel. Stegner’s colossal output (as his son calls it) of 35 books may be daunting to a reader new to his work. Where does the Stegner initiate start? Obviously, with Marking the Sparrow’s Fall which presents a fine cross section of essays, travel pieces, sketches, and fiction. And it concludes with one of the most powerful pieces of western realism to be found anywhere the chilling novella Genesis. As noted earlier, Stegner used aridity as a defining characteristic of the North American West. He wrote, aridity and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one. While it may define the West, dryness is definitely not a feature of Stegner’s writing.

Writer, environmentalist, professor Wallace Stegner was all of these, but he was also a consummate westerner. All of these facets are represented in Marking the Sparrow’s Fall. Once a westerner himself, writer Jim Grinnell lives in DeKalb, Illinois.

Everyone loves a lover, and people have always been fascinated by love stories. The oversized volume entitled Love: A Century of Love and Passion by Florence Montreynaud is an in-depth look at some of the most famous couples of the 20th century. Beginning in 1900 and continuing by decade to 1998, Montreynaud documents the known and the unknown, including Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric, John and Jackie Kennedy, and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love — which proves love makes strange bedfellows. Particularly poignant is the final article on the incredible love story of Paul and Linda McCartney, and Paul’s unwavering devotion to his wife during her final days.

During the late 1950s and 1960s, Norman Podhoretz was influential both as a literary critic and as the editor of Commentary magazine. He wrote a positive review of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel for which the early reviews were mixed. He wrote an essay on Norman Mailer’s early work that appeared in Partisan Review, which helped Mailer gain credibility within the literary establishment. As an editor, Podhoretz brought the writings of Paul Goodman and Norman O. Brown to the attention of a national audience. He also became the youngest member of “the Family,” a group of New York-based writers and intellectuals whose work appeared regularly in various literary and activist journals of opinion.

Podhoretz, like others in the Family, was an “old style liberal” who, as he writes, “participated in the conversion to radicalism” during this period. But gradually, his political views changed. He began to believe “that the revolutionism of the New Left was both futile and dangerous” and that it had caused a “spiritual plague” to descend on many young people. As he saw it, what many of those in the counterculture shared was an intense hatred of America. Even at Podhoretz’s most radical, he still loved America, and his “own utopian aspirations were directed at perfecting, not destroying, it.” As Podhoretz’s Columbia University professor and literary mentor Lionel Trilling put it, there were serious disagreements and broken relationships. In his absorbing new memoir Ex-Friends, Podhoretz shares stories about some of his relationships with major cultural figures during this turbulent time. Each relationship was unique both in the depth of friendship and the issues over which they disagreed. Perhaps of equal importance are the richly drawn portraits of notable figures such as Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, and Norman Mailer. Of Trilling, Podhoretz writes “. . . against very stiff competition, I am still inclinded to rate him . . . as the most intelligent person I have ever known.” Mailer called Podhoretz his “foul-weather friend,” someone who stood by Mailer during the most difficult times. But Podhoretz can be both generous in his praise and harsh in his criticism of his ex-friends. Despite everything, Podhoretz regrets the loss of the intellectual-literary world that he was part of during that period. He believes “that the absence today of a community like the Family constitutes a great loss for our culture.” Anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the literary culture of the ’60s will want to read this insightful, at times combative, memoir.