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In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity.
That's Martin Amis speaking admiringly about a master of descriptive writing, the late John Updike. Updike's painterly work shows up in countless composition classes whenever a descriptive paragraph or essay is assigned.
In novels, short stories, essays, and poems, Updike could evoke the distinctive flavor of a place through a precise cataloging of its contents, as in this sketch of the Olinger Post Office and Minor's Luncheonette in the 1940s:
The pinball machine and the cancellation machine were twins of noise: where in the post office there was a small shelf bearing a dirty ruffle-edged blotter, a few splayed pens, and two dried bottles with gimcrack hinged mouths, in the luncheonette there was a small table offering for sale plastic cigarette cases, miniature gilt picture frames containing washed-out photographs of June Allyson and Yvonne de Carlo, playing cards with kittens and Scotties and cottages and lagoons on the back, and depraved 29-cent items like transparently loaded dice, celluloid pop eyes and buck teeth, dribble glasses, and painted plaster dog turds.
(The Centaur, 1963)
Such details of place often bring out a sense of character as well. Here, for instance, Updike's young narrator recalls the early-morning rituals of his schoolteacher father:
In our kitchen, he would bolt his orange juice (squeezed on one of those ribbed glass sombreros and then poured off through a strainer) and grab a bite of toast (the toaster a simple tin box, a kind of little hut with slit and slanted sides, that rested over a gas burner and browned one side of the bread, in stripes, at a time), and then he would dash, so hurriedly that his necktie flew back over his shoulder, down through our yard, past the grapevines hung with buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, to the yellow brick building, with its tall smokestack and wide playing fields, where he taught.
("My Father on the Verge of Disgrace," in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 2000)
Note those "buzzing Japanese-beetle traps": Updike's descriptions often involve multiple senses. Listen, for example, to the sounds made by a mail carrier in winter:
When it snows, that is the most fun; amid the wide secretive radiance his footsteps thump-thump up the steps as if enlarged by burlap wrappings, and the clack of the letter slot resounds through the house like a shot.And here, from Updike's memoir, Self-Consciousness, is another version of the experience :
("The Mailman" in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, 1983)
Mr. Miller, also, was our mailman, a stocky short man leaning doggedly away from the pull of his leather pouch. As a small child I would look up Philadelphia Avenue for his coming and, when his footsteps scraped our front brick wall, would lie down in the foyer against the front door, hold my breath, and let his clacking shower of mail fall all over me.Finally, from the same work, a brief description that appeals at once to our senses of sight, sound, and smell:
The doctor, who had supervised my birth, was a heavy, slow, pink-lidded man, with a slippery lower lip; he carried with him on his dark clothes the medicinal smell of his office, where the black-cushioned waiting-room furniture produced, sat on, a sound like his own weary sighs.
("A Soft Spring in Shillington," in Self-Consciousness: A Memoir, 1989)
Updike proved that a carefully crafted description can be a powerful means of reclamation and celebration. "All views have something glorious about them," he said in his memoir. "The act of seeing is itself glorious, and of hearing, and feeling, and tasting."
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