John Updike's “Toward Evening”: Hoodwinked

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It begins on a near-empty bus grinding through the city. We gaze in wonder at the steel and flash of glass, at the splash of people on the streets, and then, in the gathering twilight, through our ever-more-lucid reflection in the window of the now-lit bus, we catch glints of synchronized neon, the swirl of fashionable theatergoers, hookers poised on the curbs, a clot of people hunched over something on the sidewalk, the ghostly emptiness of dark alleyways and courtyards. Gradually, we become aware that for some time we have been staring without thought at the ads posted above the bus windows. One, in particular, now catches our attention: two athletic young people with antiseptic grins hugging, in a huge splash of water, miraculously keeping their cigarettes dry all the while. This cigarette ad, for a product pronounced definitively . . hazardous to health, proclaims, ALIVE WITH PLEASURE! Aha, we think, we must riding what might called Allegorical Transit--just the kind offered in two early stories Hugh Hood and John Updike. Hood has expressed his debt to such Canadian writers as Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan; both have created what Hood's standard is an oeuvre of the sort to which he aspires. His admiration for Proust and Joyce--whom he has professed to have emulated--is well known. In essays, interviews, and the introductions of the first four volumes of his Collected Stories, he has on occasion described his interest in or the influence of certain American writers. But on none of these occasions has he mentioned John Updike. Updike's absence from Hood's litany of writers is curious, since very strong parallels exist between the two writers. For example, Updike's The Coup (1978) and Hood's You Can't Get There from Here (1972) are political novels set in fictional African countries. Furthermore, Hood's New Age novels (1975-1995), though a longer series, find their match in significance and intention in Updike's four Rabbit novels, attempts at documenting the contemporary period, especially middle-class life. In fact, both have written large bodies of in which a specific North American geographic location or region is not only recognizable, but central to the works' meaning. Likewise, Hood and Updike make extensive fictional use, often ironic, of North American popular culture, commercial products, and the artifacts of daily living, and both have used sports as an important source of metaphor and symbolism. On the other hand, as a young man Updike studied art formally, while Hood has expressed a wish that he were an art critic, is married to an artist, and painted the watercolor published on the cover of his short novel Five New Facts about Giorgione (1987). Finally, in the present postmodern, materialistic, and secular North American literary world, both are conspicuous in their claim of being Christian writers--Updike Lutheran in upbringing, Hood by birth, upbringing, and mature conviction a Roman Catholic (Author's Introduction IV, 10)--and of seeing in the physical world embodiments of the transcendental. One special link illustrating these parallels, especially that of religion, is found in an early story each writer, Hood's Flying a Red Kite and Updike's Toward Evening. Toward Evening, first published in The New Yorker in June 1958, was collected in The Same Door (1959), Updike's first collection of stories. Flying a Red Kite was written in July 1961 (Introduction 1:26) and published in Hood's first collection of the same name, which appeared in 1962. Hood says that during his six years teaching at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut, from 1955 to 1961, he was trying to learn to write fiction while reading... and new writing (Introduction 1: 18). He wrote his first story in 1957 and claims to have decided intentionally not to write stories for magazines such as The Post or Collier's, but rather to strive to be able to write for Esquire and The New Yorker. …