Selected By Cyril Wong

This is a queer one. I am referring here to a review by John Updike on Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell and how it has mistakenly been read solely through the perspective that John Updike is homophobic. This is not to say that there is no evidence for this, but the review is more interesting and the gay-related issues it raises are far more complicated than just a straightforward case of gay-bashing. Updike's review of Alan Hollinghurst's book, titled "A Same-Sex Idyll", was published first in The New Yorker then in his anthology of essays, Due Considerations (I found the review on page 302 of this 2007 Penguin anthology, which is funny and oddly appropriate since "302" is the medical-code for "queer" in Singapore's National Service where homosexuality is still read as mental illness). Gay playwright Tony Kushner described Updike's review as "an attack" and representative of "a kind of genteel tradition of disdain for homosexuals" that has long been prevalent at The New Yorker. The truths in Kushner's responses aside (hatred of queer folk, implicitly or explicitly expressed, is really not that interesting, even as folks like me rally against it all the time), I actually believe there is more going on in Updike's review than maybe even the reviewer intended. But let us enter the review to see Kushner's point first; Updike's tone is arguably homophobic from the moment it begins:

The novels of the English writer Alan Hollinghurst take some getting used to; they are relentlessly gay in their personnel, and after a while you begin to long for the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character. Save for the briefly and reluctantly glimpsed sister or mother, there are none... Hollinghurst does not merely write... from within a gay sensibility; he constructs an all-gay world, a Genet prison without the guards. With the avidity of an anthropologist gone native, he inventories the rites and stations of banded gayness - the drug-saturated dance clubs and Dionysian raves, the porno houses and their muffled swift couplings, the public lavatories and secluded park thickets, the lingo, the jokes....

Gay men as frivolous, misogynistic hedonists—if a gay man were to assert this, he would be accused of self-hatred or of internalising heteronormative homophobia. Yet Hollinghurst's novel is trying to make its point—unfortunately there is truth in what Updike reads as Hollinghurst's take on aspects of gay culture as portrayed in the novel. But Updike does go on a little too long about this, without awareness of the gay-hating tone that has been gradually creeping into his voice:

Penile sizes, tilts, tints and flavors are registered with a botanical precision; this reader was struck by how freely the particulars of a lover's parts are shared in the friendly equivalent of girl talk....And yet the mood...is rather lugubrious and disheartened. Boredom swoops in without hetero clutter to obstruct its advent....The Spell is mostly about spells wearing off...Partners change, and new loves shoot up in blasted hearts....Breakups come swiftly, too....The relationships that do survive enjoy the same intricacy of balanced imbalances...as heterosexual matches...

It is not only homophobic but sexist when Updike reduces talk of gay sex to "girl talk"—what is so wrong about girl talk that makes it any worse than "guy talk" when discussing sex acts? And you do not get any more homophobic than comparing healthy gay relationships to straight ones, insinuating that the best queer relations succeed because they mimic heterosexual bonds perfectly in their "balanced imbalances". Updike could have put it in another, more neutral, way: relationships succeed when states of "balanced imbalances" are achieved, regardless of whether such relationships are homosexual or not. See how easy that was?

Updike is then eager to demonstrate his intellectual objectivity as a reviewer (with a writing style as pretentiously dry as his own novels) but hones in a little too quickly on the deplorable state of being gay in Hollinghurst's work:

Alan Hollinghurst writes beautifully. His eye for nature is keen and tender; his sense of weather, both inner and outer, strong. He has an architect's feeling for decor and for the pathos of the sturdy buildings that our moods flit through.... And yet reading this relatively short novel is work... Little momentum builds around The Spell's intertwining affairs; nothing is at stake but self-gratification. Novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family...

The "sacralized structures of the family"? I mean, oh my, is this for real? Updike as the sexually uptight gay-hating pastor—who would have thought?

A classic Greek ideal of masculine fellowships disintegrates, before our eyes...; the spectacle is as melancholy as the book's lachrymose pink jacket. Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society's circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the lonely human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight.

Warranted bitchiness aside, I really do appreciate Updike's last sentence. Society's "circumambient encouragements to breed" is a pretty neat way of saying we are all insidiously conditioned to produce families in order to extend ourselves selfishly into the future (contrast this to that lie about "unconditional love" which parents enjoy telling themselves when producing babies). And there is ambivalence in the last line about taking it straight: read in one way, Updike could be insisting that gays turn hetero in order to find happiness; but to "take it straight" also sounds like taking a shot of vodka straight up: the male homosexual must confront the bleakness of his condition (being marginalised by straight folks actually sucks) head on, without retreating into self-destructive hedonism or promiscuity. The reviewer is giving sound advice; and Updike, in a bid to sound clever by the end of his review, might not even have intended it.

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