SOURCE: "Indifference," in Picked-Up Pieces, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, pp. 416-22.

[Updike is a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, critic, short story writer, essayist, poet, and dramatist. In the review below, originally published November 2, 1968, in The New Yorker, he faults Morning Noon and Night for its stuffy, tedious, pessimistic, and pedantic style.]

Beginning, forty years ago, with a style of sober purity, James Gould Cozzens has purposefully evolved a prose unique in its mannered ugliness, a monstrous mix of Sir Thomas Browne, legalese, and Best-Remembered Quotations. The opening chapter of his new novel, Morning Noon and Night, cloudy as a polluted pond, swarms with verbal organisms of his strange engendering. As Cozzen-sologists before me have discovered, there is no substitute for the tabulated list. We have the Unresisted Cliché:

Here are clouds of witnesses, faces and forms in serried ranks …

I don't intend here any telling in mournful numbers.

Simply, the wood is not to be seen for the trees.

The Lame Echo:

To be sure, in this distraction of the mind, as through a glass darkly …

You have not world enough and time….

I feel it leaves man as much as before the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

The False Precision, the Legal "Or":

… to inform yourself of any peculiarities or limitations of his that could have affected his observation or could now be coloring his report.

… what they seem in our work or practice. I am not suggesting that I feel we are or ever could be ethically obligated….

… by elements of lust whether loving or unloving, a catalog longer or shorter of women …

The Vapid Expansion:

What used to be, not just well enough, but often very good indeed, must be left religiously alone.

The Inversion Frightful, Capped by Cute Periphrasis:

In eating employed now are partial dental prosthetic devices.

Be that how it may, Nancy, as friends call her, will not refuse the rites mysterious of connubial love.

The Gratuitous Scientism:

Penetrated, the microscopic cell is fertilized (in accepted language of the process, two gametes fuse to form a zygote).

The Infatuated Sonority:

His course of ripe and ripe is running, and the rot and rot won't fail to follow….

Multitudinous as these remembered works of Nature may be, more multitudinous still, and by far, must be remembered works of man.

What Cozzens has set himself to achieve, and has, as he might say, so regrettably succeeded in achieving, is the literary equivalent for or capture of the all too veritably human quality of stuffiness. In tone and tedium, Morning Noon and Night is a four-hundred-page-long after-dinner speech.

The speaker is Henry Dodd Worthington; the dinner has been his life. Born at the turn of the century as the son of a small-college English professor, the narrator of this novel, after an acceptable education at an unnamed prep school and Harvard, and after shrugging off both teaching and writing as possible careers, drifted into employment with a Boston collection agency, and from this indifferent beginning rose to found Henry Worthington Associates, a management-consultant firm of prestige so immense that both he and the reader find it implausible. He has been twice married: his first wife, Judith, cuckolded and divorced him; his second, Charlotte, committed suicide. Violence, indeed, has made rather free with his relatives; his parents were asphyxiated in a hotel fire, and his two grandchildren were killed in the crash of a plane. Henry (or "our Hank," as he jocosely calls himself) is of genteel Protestant background, an indirect descendant of President Franklin Pierce; during the Second World War he served as an Air Forces major, mostly in the Pentagon; his present preoccupations are the unhappiness of his daughter Elaine, now on her third divorce, and the composition of this memoir. The events of his life are not related consecutively but emerge as his memory rambles over the past; he ruminates at length upon such diverse matters as his grandfather's feud with the early Freudians, the tricks of management consultation, the technique of running an antiques shop, the sinking of the Titanic, the vagaries of chance, the nature of the Puritan heritage, the ups and downs and ins and outs of sexual "appetency," and (an unexpected obsession) the shabbiness of the literary world. Many of these essays, once the muddled sonority of the style is tuned out, possess interest, even a certain surly brilliance, but as a life the book lacks what it must have—life.

Elaine is the only character other than the narrator allowed to have any kind of a say; the novel's keystone scene is an interview between the distressed daughter and the stiff but sorry father, held in the courtyard of H.W. Associates' posh new suburban plant. But when, after seventy solid pages of authorial discourse, quotation marks appear amid the print and Elaine breaks into speech, she talks just like a little Henry, or (since without a doubt our Hank is pretty much our Jim) a little Cozzens. Listen to her:

"So when Wilfred deflowered me I was pretty much, as the books say, unawakened."

"You know; lovely Sue makes like softly panting while the geranium tree is planting. And doesn't that show what's up for grabs here is love forever true, and oughtn't he to latch onto it?"

"You bet! Moving finger writes. Correct. And all my tears, or such as I've let drip, don't wash out a word."

Embarrassed, apparently, by her own wealth of literary tags, she admonishes her father, "Don't forget the expensive liberal-arts education you bought me. When it pays to, I can sound tolerably literate." But it doesn't pay; their conversation is lumpy with false wit and stilted slang and brittle with a supervisory knowingness—not a dramatization of her plight but an awkward exposition of it. So it is with the entire book. Henry's marriage to Judith, by all indications the deepest relationship of his life, is represented by some mocking paragraphs on newlywed lust, a potentially poignant but skimped account of their courtship, an unskimped theory as to how her father's anti-sexual High Anglicanism drove her decades later to promiscuity, a few cursory references to their divorce, a full exposition of Henry's financial advice to the antiques business she sets up in, and a glancing admission that now she is dying. She hardly speaks a sentence; for her one moment onstage, she is seen through her daughter's eyes distantly on a beach, coupling with a lover. Charlotte, the second wife, appears in Henry's account as a suicide note, as a glimpse of her in the shower (heavily misted by panting references to David and Bathsheba), and as an equable compliment to her secretarial ability. All the characters—wives, friends, business associates, service colleagues—are immersed, mute and all but immobile, in the tyrannous flow of Henry Worthington's disquisitional lava.

Now, to what extent does the author stand apart from his persona, as, say, John Marquand does from George Apley? How much of Henry's stuffiness is intentional caricature? Is his sluggish eclipse of the life he has lived a novelistic defect or an ironical comment? Mockery there is in abundance: Henry mocks his youthful ardor, his elderly dignity, his riskless wartime career, the little shams and maneuvers of his trade. His memory seeks out low moments: "mean actions of mine; uglinesses of greed or lust; shameful exhibitions of ignorance; deserved humiliations; mortifying follies and defeats." And the epigraph from Shakespeare's Sonnet 94, describing those who, "moving others, are themselves as stone," suggests that a selfportrait of a type of man and an implicit judgment were intended. But Marquand, even in his later novels, maintained an outsider's perspective on his Brahmins, whereas Worthington's voice and Cozzens' are indistinguishable, and the opinions of author and character merge in a ponderous, pessimistic morass of self-distrust and weary puzzlement.

Having troubled to invent a business profession for his alter ego, and having supplied a convincing amount of data and theory, Cozzens compulsively reverts throughout his narrative to the problems of the literary practitioner, to attacks upon "half-writer pretenders" and "liberal intellectuals." He includes a coy reference to the minor American writer Frederick Cozzens. He gives Henry, the supposed author of a million memos and directives, his own preposterously pedantic style, including the obligatory exotic words—inappetency, erethism, furibund, condign, innominate, muliebrity, deontology. Frequently heard is the rumble of hobby-horses being ridden by that ultra-conservative Cozzens displayed years ago in Time—a kind of male Ayn Rand who in this book must dote upon a fictional bank's status "in the best financial circles" as being "better regarded than the latter-day not always prudent House of Morgan," who speaks of Roosevelt's "near-senile megalomania" and the Kremlin's "dupes" and "expert perfidies and duplicities," and who seems pleasurably smitten by the speculation that a typhoon would have wiped out our scheduled invasion of the Japanese home islands had not the war been ended by the atomic bombs, which in passing are viewed as the "means to right a ceaselessly growing imbalance in Nature, to solve quickly and easily theretofore insoluble problems of excess population."

Not that political conservatives should be barred from the halls of fiction; rather, they should be better represented there, to relieve the present rather shrill unanimity on the left. Nor is author/alter-ego closeness an intrinsic handicap; Herzog, for example, is an excellent novel. Its superiority to Morning Noon and Night lies not only in Bellow's far livelier gift for conjuring up personalities but in his, and Herzog's, belief that a better world somewhere exists, that improvement can be sought and choices can be made. The illusion of free will, illusion or not, is necessary to a novel; excitement and import derive from the reality of human decision. As Henry Dodd Worthington describes himself, he has been always a product, a zygote formed by two fused gametes, in the grip, successively and simultaneously, of biology, heredity, social usage, sexual impulse, chance, and inertia. The turning points of his life—his marriage to Judith, his entry into the world of business, his enlistment in the Army Air Forces, his divorce and remarriage—are all seen as uncaused drift, "little governed by logic or demonstrable cause and effect." Herzog, at the end, can stop writing letters and set the table for a tryst, whereas Henry can only conclude that he knows nothing, that his life has been a "wandering directionless," a game of "blindman's buff—now sightlessly bumping into things, now surprised by sportive unreturnable blows." His memories—in the book's last, best flight, of imagery—are seen as ruined fragments and, far off, "a dozen or more aqueduct arches, commencing suddenly, suddenly ending, coming now from nowhere, now going nowhere." There is "thin final sunlight," and then "the child must soon be taken away to bed." A child is someone who lacks responsibility and power of choice; Henry Dodd Worthington, adviser to big business, labels himself as one. This vision of helpless, pointless process is at the heart of the novel's profound inaction, of its analyzed but unrealized events, and even of its reactionary style, seeping backward to include all those tired mottoes and phrases and clichés as if wryly to admit that nothing new can be said. Resigned pessimism is a defensible philosophy, and may be the natural end of American enterprise, but it makes for very dull fiction.

Piqued by this book's curious badness, I turned to Cozzens' first full-length novel, The Last Adam. Though a trifle slick, with its climactic town meeting and its magnificent starring role for an aging screen idol (it was made into a movie, Dr. Bull, starring Will Rogers), it holds up well; the evocation of the Connecticut town of New Winton, the tight knit of weather and geography and people into a plot, the particularity and immediacy of every scene all show a mastery remarkable in a man of thirty. Cozzens then had more grasp of ordinary, middling America—or at least more willingness to transmute his grasp into art—than Hemingway and Fitzgerald ever showed. The hero of the novel, Dr. Bull, is sixty-seven, just about Henry Worthington's age, and he remembers the sentence from the Psalmist with which Henry begins his memoir: "I have been young and now am old." And cosmic nullity is present in both books: "Left to herself [a telephone operator in The Last Adam], and to what she could see of the universe, real and ideal were lost together in an indifference so colossal, so utterly indifferent, that there was no defining it." This colossal indifference, this abyss beneath society and conventional success, has always been with Cozzens, but as a threat, as a defining darkness, not as an all-swallowing enemy. From The Last Adam to Morning Noon and Night, the broad social scene of New Winton, primarily Protestant, has dwindled to one member of the Puritan aristocracy; class consciousness has narrowed to class loyalty. Cozzens has become like a Yale undergraduate in the earlier book: "He knew by now that he and his more intimate friends were right; or, at any rate, he could easily see that people who differed conspicuously in dress or behavior, in ideals or attitudes, were, as far as his college was concerned, wrong. His gray eyes considered all those in error with a level, complete indifference." Arthur Winner, of By Love Possessed, gave those not of his sort short shrift. Henry Worthington doesn't see them at all, they are squeezed into the remotest margins of his memoir, and there is nowhere to stand to see him, to judge him. Only the bitter vacuity of his conclusions betrays the possibility that somewhere along the way he went wrong.