Plumbing by John Updike, 1971
The magic trick:
Using a plumbing repair to wax nostalgic about a house and the passing of time
Get ready for seven straight days of Updike here on SSMT. We’ll get frustrated together, maybe even offended, and – if you hang in there – probably transported into the special vortex of pure artistic beauty that few writers have ever found. So it should be fun!
We begin in the early 1970s with “Plumbing,” which prompts the question: How dare Updike find a stunningly beautiful story in something as thoroughly uninteresting as a visit from a plumber?
It’s pretty ridiculous, but he’s certainly done it here. I actually wouldn’t claim this as a great story. The opening section relies on a gimmicky plumbing pricing receipt listed in the text, and it struck me as not at all clever. And truth be told, the plumbing symbol/metaphor is mostly uninteresting.
But quietly tucked away in the meat of the story is inarguable beauty. Updike, always obsessed with houses, travels back through the house his family has recently moved out of and revisits bits and pieces of their 12 years there in an almost-ghostly fashion. He sees the empty rooms but conjures the events that happened there. It’s a truly beautiful mechanism rich with nostalgia and real sadness.
One memory, in particular, floored me. So much of Updike feels like autobiography pushed through a “Aren’t I interesting for thinking or doing this?” filter. Everything is so considered to make the Updike stand-in characters appear a certain way, so that even when the stories are detailing those characters’ flaws and mistakes, they almost always pit him as the tragic hero. I don’t mean this as a criticism, really. If it doesn’t nauseate you – and it does not me – then it’s part of the appeal, I think. You can learn more about the character (and the author) in the way his life is framed than by what the author maybe thinks he is creating. But even if you enjoy that style, you must admit that the result is a body of work that lacks a certain core truth. The core truth of the entire oeuvre is that Updike can’t let go of control of his own narrative even as he is feeding the twin need to share his life with us.
Anyhow, the scene here when the narrator recalls his wife crying, the children bearing burdens of guilt, and the narrator responding by punching his wife – well, dare I say, it’s the closest I can recall Updike to getting really real. Of course, he’s back to his old tricks in the very next sentence, taking control of our focus to center on what he clearly considers to be the interesting realization that this man relished the punch and subsequent weeping. But for that brief moment, there he let something truly ugly through the filter. Which of course is truly beautiful.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
I see a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress stepping around the back yard, in a cold drizzle that makes them giggle, at two o’clock on Easter morning. They are hiding chocolate eggs in tinfoil and are drunk. In the morning, they will have sickly-sweet headaches, and children will wake them with the shrieks and quarrels of the hunt, and come to their parents’ bed with chocolate-smeared mouths and sickening sweet breaths; but it is the apparition of early morning I see, from the perspective of a sober conscience standing in the kitchen, these two partygoers tiptoeing in the muddy yard, around the forsythia bush, up to the swing set and back. Easter bunnies.
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