My consideration of Faulkner and Updike together is not arbitrary. Despite the differences in their generations and background, there are many surprising similarities in their work—one of these is particularly relevant to the future of the American novel: each author produces work which shows the contrary pulls of structure and the absence of structure. By this I do not mean that each writes some books which are structured and some which are not; I mean that repeatedly one encounters in their novels structures adopted and abandoned, and finds therefore one of the great problems of the twentieth-century novel—the relationship between order and meaning on the one hand, and chaos and nonsense on the other, a struggle which is fought out not only through their themes but through the very texture of the works themselves. The consequences for the novel's traditional habit of expressing all its themes (even ones of formlessness) in a formal structure are interesting—as interesting as the future of its traditional techniques. (p. 73)

[Updike's] novels have for the most part enjoyed a wide and varied readership, and as far as the general public goes his name is well known. However, neither intellectually nor academically is he as well thought of as he might be. Though he does not lack academic attention, all too often he is seen as slick, rhapsodic, glossy and middlebrow. While I think those criticisms are not entirely groundless, and am of the opinion that he has not come close to fulfilling his real promise, there is a great deal to be said for him as a writer of what is both good and representational in the modern American novel. (p. 91)

Updike's works, like Faulkner's, reveal an increasing unease with structure, whether in form or content; in Updike's case this shows particularly in the concentration on perception as a last desperate remedy for the problem of meaninglessness. Again and again, like so many modern novelists, he returns to describe and evoke experience—no matter what that experience may be—for, in the face of increasing social and personal collapse, the feeling of the moment is the only positive reality man has. Of course, his novels contain other elements, but their real texture and force come from the linking of moments of intense experience—for again it is only in these moments that his characters know they are alive…. The only thing Rabbit knows is how he feels; he does not understand external circumstances, the hard facts of his or Ruth's plight, the arguments about the rights and wrongs of the situation with the clergyman Eccles; the only right or good he can understand is the ecstasy of the moment. And it is interesting that in Rabbit Run we have the forerunner of something which comes to obsess Updike in Couples and Rabbit Redux—namely, the ecstasy to be got from inverting experience. Like some latter-day Huysmans, Rabbit deliberately desecrates his sacramental experience with Ruth. (I think this is a process still unresolved in Updike; as in Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, he manifests the contrary desires to shock the reader with the 'secret' knowledge of perversion and then to convince him that because it is knowledge it is not perverse.)

Updike's concern with the relationship between intense experience and morality receives a much more detailed treatment in Couples. (pp. 91-3)

Updike's treatment of sex in this novel has led him to be accused of pornography—there is so much sex and it is described in such, almost gloating, detail. Yet his intention is not pornographic. He goes over different sex between different people to discover what sex is. What is it this experience that is so important; why do we do it; why do we want to do it; do we want to do it? One is reminded of Faulkner's hypnotic waltzing round and round the subject, stressing by each return to it the importance of the same questions. Again like Faulkner, Updike is concerned with what the experience of sex means in relation to other experiences, and the various meanings we put upon them.

In Updike this concern is superficially more straightforward. His characters say out loud what Faulkner's never could; yet, as Couples goes on, we realise that things are not as simple as they seem. Even if Updike does not treat with incest and sexually intense violence, sex in Couples becomes more and more twisted; and the unsatisfactory nature of sex as a substitute for all that is wrong in life—and especially in American society—becomes evident…. There is something unbalanced about Piet's sexual obsession with pregnancy, and we can also see that his sexual experiences are becoming increasingly isolated and selfish. Indeed, if the affection and joy which Piet has given Foxy has turned into this, we see that his is really a barbaric exploiting tenderness of the sort Lawrence was always quick to portray in the characters he disliked. Thus the healing restorative quality which Updike's characters seek in the sexual experience seems to be not only transitory but in the end destructive, itself reasserting the very confusion and unhappiness it sought to solve. Sex, which was 'good' to Piet, becomes in the end for him what it is to the other couples—something to pass the time, to ward off boredom, to occupy the blank meaningless space between adolescence and senility in a blank meaningless universe.

This blankness and meaninglessness is illustrated by the other alternatives to sex that Updike offers. Among these, religion and politics are paramount. Like Faulkner, Updike is obsessed with religion, or rather with religions. He himself said that the question his novels are posing is 'after Christianity what?', and he always introduces religion early on. In Rabbit Run, for example, we are told in the first few chapters that Rabbit and his wife Janice are Christians, and the interest in and influence on their problems which the clergyman Eccles is allowed to take illustrates a particularly American phenomenon—the continuing conventional importance of religion in American life. (pp. 93-5)

[When] Updike introduces the Church into his novels, he is dealing with a local historico/social as well as a universal religious phenomenon….

[The] loss of religious meaning is seen as the loss of traditional American social meaning. (p. 96)

But religion does not provide meaning any more than sex does. For one thing, it does not greatly affect the characters' lives….

Politics is equally ineffective as an alternative. It, like the question of religion or the fear of death, haunts and punctuates the characters and their actions. (p. 97)

Throughout Couples we hear of the growing American involvement in Vietnam; in Rabbit Redux the theme continues (one of the achievements of Updike's writing is that he can make Harry into a 'hawk' on Vietnam because of his sensitivity—and make us believe it). In both books, politics intersect with the characters' lives only to make them appear more terrifyingly inexplicable. (p. 98)

After considering at such length meaninglessness and its relation to experience, one should notice Updike's own tendency to opt out of any final, definite impression left by his books. He likes to see his novels as open-ended, a fact that sometimes bothers his critics. He has made it plain that the end of Couples is ambiguous…. (p. 99)

[Although] there is more than one way to read the end, and therefore to interpret the whole of an Updike novel, I am not finally convinced. As with Faulkner, the coherent interpretations which may be placed upon the book do not adequately express the impression that the work itself makes. As with Faulkner, there is a strange dissonance between what the book talks about (its ideas and issues and themes) and what it is about (the feelings it engenders and obsessively returns to).

Here the question of guilt arises…. For Updike's central characters are both in pursuit of and in flight from guilt, a process which involves a distortion of experience—particularly sexual and religious experience—and of whatever meaning they are seeking. Thus, Rabbit both wishes to take on himself guilt for what is wrong with everything and everybody, and, having taken on the responsibility, wants—as we have seen in his treatment of Ruth—to escape from it. One questions (as in the case of Faulkner's characters) how representative the feelings of a character so obsessed can really be, and indeed how far the author understands or can cope with an emotion in which he himself appear to be deeply involved. (pp. 102-03)

The writer who is conscious that he is using a symbol, or alternatively of what it is his symbols stand for, is in danger of losing some of his spontaneous force; his symbols become ideas, and his narrative either splits away from them or has to be mechanically twisted to accommodate them. Both of these particularly twentieth-century problems apply to Updike, and to a lesser extent to Faulkner. When the church burns down in Couples, many readers object not because it is a symbol but because Piet is too conscious of it as such. Watching it burn is not traumatic; it is simply watching an idea burn. Similarly, Updike's really spectacular skill as a narrator, his capacity to grip us by the sequence of events, becomes twisted by the need for the events to mean things; a symbolic significance which can only be found, never (except in an entirely stylised work) placed.

What interests me here with regard to the twentieth-century American novel in general and Updike in particular is the consequences to narrative. (pp. 105-06)

Updike shows great power and skill [in his development of narrative]. We are driven forward at a cracking pace, sometimes even against our will. Even in the pretentious The Centaur, which suffers from a severe prolapse of the poetic faculty, we still want to know what is going to happen next. Yet, as with Faulkner, there is something strange about the relationship between narrative and the novel as a whole. We can see how, for example, in Light in August, Faulkner tells a whole series of stories—begins with the story of one character, tells it at great length and with great skill, then abandons it to begin another and pick up the first much later. This relates, of course, to my point about Faulkner and his dislike of an ordered context. This applies also to Updike; in Couples or Rabbit Redux we have the stories of several characters and, at the same time, a pull between the story of the character and the meaning which the author wishes to convey in it.

Here we find one of the great problems of the twentieth-century novel in general and the American form in particular—namely, that the traditional tools of the novelist, character and narrative, which were in the nineteenth century naturally allied to meaning, now have to be forced either because they no longer have a meaning to convey or because they are no longer an adequate medium of communication. So we find the traditional artistic impulse to communicate, coupled with the fear that communication is either meaningless or impossible.

This has far-reaching consequences; it may account for the crisis of confidence often found in modern novels, and especially for the abrupt abandonment or unconvincing completion of books that are promisingly begun. It may also account for the way in which the twentieth-century American novel has for many writers become a search, as if in the use of traditional skills a new tradition may emerge, as if through the very process of writing about life, life may reveal the secret of why we write about it—the secret of its lost meaning. (p. 106)