In his admirably venturesome work as a book reviewer, John Updike has proved himself a trustworthy and enthusiastic guide to that lushest of literary continents, The Latin American Novel, where anything can happen and the impossible is a commonplace. This is the land of “magic realism,” where, as Updike himself has written, “the past~dashpersonal, familial, and national—weathers into fabulous shapes in memory without surrendering its fundamental truth” and “fantasy . . . is a higher level of honesty in the rendering of experience.” This is the land where, as an instrument for exploring human reality, the psychological novel will not do. What is needed—and here I quote Updike quoting Borges—is “an ideal ‘adventure story’ that ‘does not propose to be a transcription of reality’ but is instead ‘an artificial object, no part of which lacks justification.’ This efficiency is akin to magic, which assumes . . . that ‘things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy.’” For the Latin American novel, “the ‘only possible integrity’ is that of ‘magic, in which—clear and defined—every detail is an omen and a cause.’”
But the book’s exotic setting is never a mere pastiche of other writers’ travelogue.
A couple of years ago, Updike traveled in Brazil, and the joyous, dangerous, sun-stunned world he found there clearly exhilarated him. His visits to Rio and São Paulo and Brasília, and his affection for the literature of Latin America, have prompted him to write, in this his sixteenth novel, his own magic-realist adventure story. Brazil is a happy departure for Updike, an improbably successful artistic stretch, comparable in his oeuvre only to The Coup, his African novel of some fifteen years ago. Like that book, and like, more recently, the James Buchanan chapters of Memories of the Ford Administration, it often shows Updike the inveterate looker-up of facts weaving a prodigious book-learning into an elaborate fictional web. Brazil is full of Portuguese names for things (one longs, at times, for a glossary) and sharp-focus snapshots of rapidly shifting scenery (one longs, too, for a map); it is full of Brazilian local color, social, political, historical, and botanical. But the book’s exotic setting is never a mere pastiche of other writers’ travelogues: it is, on every page, a full and original imagining of a place where miracles can occur, of a tropical Albion fit for a New World romance.
Updike’s hero here is Tristão, a poor black teen-ager from the Rio slums, a brave and courtly street-thief with a razor in his pocket and an unshakeable faith in his destiny: to transcend utterly his lowly birth. His heroine is Isabel, a pale child of privilege, a beautiful virgin fresh from convent school and eager at last to taste the world. From the hour they meet, their hearts are one, this latter-day Tristan and Iseult: they are meant to sacrifice, to suffer, even to extinguish their former selves for each other—meant, in Tristão’s own words, “to make for the world an example of love.” He really talks that way, like a figure out of Chrétien de Troyes, and so does his beloved Isabel, but the high style of their dialogue works: it is of a piece with the rest of this chivalric “adventure story,” which, following Borges’s prescription, “does not propose to be a transcription of reality” but dares to deal in archetypes, portents, and sorcery, in encounters with Evil and hair’s-breadth escapes. Brazil is a richly patterned metaphysical cliffhanger, and as I am loath to give away even one turn of its twisting plot, I will go no further than to say that it’s also a dark, disquieting meditation on what it is to be male and female, black and white, rich and poor, at one with the world and at odds with every man. It is an “artificial object,” created as a challenge to the author’s own patented brand of middle-way American verisimilitude, and it is bound to be misunderstood by those who expect only one thing from Updike—Rabbit, Run re-run and re-run—and are here presented with something entirely else. I found the book thrilling, not only by its own rights, as an action-driven narrative designed to thrill, but also as an instance of a contemporary master, one whom we thought we had figured out long ago, daring to re-invent himself before our jaded eyes.