"Bruce Sterling - Updike's Version" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

They're temptresses and symbols.
There's Roger Lambert's wife, Esther, for
instance. Esther ends up teaching Dale Kohler the
nature of sin, which utterly destroys Dale's annoying
moral certitude, and high time, too. Esther does this
by the simple expedient of adulterously fucking Dale's
brains out, repeatedly and in meticulously related
detail, until Dale collapses from sheer weight of
original sin.
A good trick. But Esther breezes through this
inferno of deviate carnality, none the worse for the
experience; invigorated, if anything. Updike tells us
an old tale in this: that women *are* sexuality, vast
unplumbed cisterns of it, creatures of mystery, vamps
of the carnal abyss. I just can't bring myself to go
for this notion, even if the Bible tells me so. I know
that women don't believe this stuff.
Then there's Roger Lambert's niece,

Verna. I
suspect she represents the Future, or at least the
future of America. Verna's a sad case. She lives on
welfare with her illegitimate mulatto kid, a little
girl who is Futurity even more incarnate. Verna
listens to pop music, brain-damaging volumes of it.
She's cruel and stupid, and as corrupt as her limited
sophistication allows. She's careless of herself and
others, exults in her degradation, whores sometimes
when she needs the cocaine money. During the book's
crisis, she breaks her kid's leg in a reckless fit of
temper.
A woman reading this portrayal would be
naturally enraged, reacting under the assumption that
Updike intends us to believe in Verna as an actual
human being. But Verna, being a woman, isn't. Verna is
America, instead: dreadfully hurt and spiritually
degraded, cheapened, teasing, but full of vitality,
and not without some slim hope of redemption, if she
works hard and does what's best for her (as defined by
Roger Lambert). Also, Verna possesses the magic of
fertility, and nourishes the future, the little girl
Paula. Paula, interestingly, is every single thing
that Roger Lambert isn't, i.e. young, innocent,
trusting, beautiful, charming, lively, female and not
white.
Roger sleeps with Verna. We've seen it coming
for some time. It is, of course, an act of adultery
and incest, compounded by Roger's complicity in child
abuse, quite a foul thing really, and narrated with a
certain gloating precision that fills one with real