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Toasting the Dead
In the current
New York Review of Books,
Julian Barnes writes a sweet encomium to John Updike:
The story's last sentence, in which the narrator stands back and looks at himself—or Updike stands back and looks at the narrator, or Updike stands back and looks at himself—runs:If I can read this strange old guy's mind aright, he's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.
Impossible not to think of and feel for Updike as he tapped out that sentence and then added his last full stop, his fictional endpoint. Impossible equally not to honor and thank him with a reader's raised glass, full to the brim—though preferably not with water.
(Image:
David Levine, NY Review)
Updike's death was the second saddest day of the year for me. I wrote a little tribute to him on my old blog, doesn't have anything on Barnes, though.
ReplyDeleteIn another tribute, this in the New York Times Book Review, TC Boyle offers a reading of the last line that tends in the opposite direction, away from booze! His reading, as with the whole review, also touched me less than Barnes'; it seemed a little brittle, less generous. Still, I liked the multiplicity of interpretive possibility - that for readers the last words opened up, rather than closed down.
ReplyDeleteBoyle writes: "And then in the story’s — and the collection’s — slyly affecting final line, the narrator steps outside of himself to offer up a fatalistic toast, not with intoxicating wine but with water, life’s pure essence: 'If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.'"