Yesterday I read John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair. This was his first novel, published in 1958, four years after he graduated from college. It is a remarkable book, written with his signature attention to all the subtleties of detail, and with such craft and skill so as to appear effortless. Only a few scenes, overwrought and over-crafted, betray his youth: a delivery of soda, haggling between a greedy boutique owner and a seller of quilts, and interwoven conversations from the fair, but all the rest of the novel is simply wonderful.
The Poorhouse Fair is a story of misunderstandings, of no one seeing themselves as others see them, or being seen as they see themselves. But it never occurs to anyone in the novel that they do not understand another’s motives or intentions. Only a blind woman acknowledges her lack of comprehension but she believes she can reach people through her words. She can’t. All the people, every single character, is alone in this novel, alone in their self-regard and held captive within their self-limiting knowledge of others.
There is an absolutely beautiful scene where a man is chasing down his wife’s escaped parakeet. The parakeet finds refuge in a sick room, on the bed of a dying man. The man chasing the bird comes in, grabs for the bird, and leaves quickly. But for the man on the bed the whole incident is a beautiful vision before dying, a scene of amusement and tenderness, a dance between a green flower and a bear. Misunderstanding, again, but with the lovely effect of happiness released and enjoyed for one last time.
The two main characters, Conner, prefect of the poorhouse for the elderly in a rural corner of New Jersey, and Hook, one of the oldest “inmates” (as they call themselves), try to reach beyond their selves to connect with people they deem within their care. Hook as the elder of the bunch and a former teacher, is almost pastor-like to his flock of old people, and Conner, young and ambitious, wants to make things better for the old gang but doesn’t understand that they don’t want new, they want constancy (they want the old, now dead, prefect back, drunkard that he was; at least they understood him –but actually, they didn’t). Chairs on the porch that have been marked with inmates’ names, the rain that settles on the fair, a lost cat irreparably injured by a car, an impromptu fireside discussion of heaven: each event that occurs during the space of this unusual day this holiday, the day of the Poor House Fair, is cause for misunderstanding. At the end of the long day, Hook struggles for the word that will tie him to Conner and to life, that will serve as proof of his own existence: “What was it?” he asks but no answer calls out.
Updike’s observations on life and on our gross inadequacies as humans to make any thing meaningful or real during all our years on earth are never easy reading. I struggle with the Rabbit novels, repulsed by the egoism mixed with self-hate of old (and young) Rabbit. But the characters here are neither self-involved nor truly self-hating: they are just self-deluded and struggling to reach out of the delusion for a connection, trying to forge a testament to their life. Although only the first of his novels, and not perfect by any means, The Poorhouse Fair has made me like Updike again; I am moved by the forgiving touch with which he treats his characters, a touch that is absent in his later works or maybe just too-well hidden.
