Sleeping with Expressionism

John Updike is 71, his heroine here is 78, and her memories, recounted to an interviewer, centre on the art world of the 1950s. This is no septuagenarian author aching to be up to date. The one young contemporary in the novel - priggish, callow Kathryn, art writer and interviewer - is sketchily drawn, largely, one suspects, because Updike is not too interested in her. After around 50 books he has earned a little self-indulgence.

An almost-artist himself, who studied at art college and has written many excellent articles and reviews on the subject, Updike's interest lies less in today's talkie-art than in the post-war flowering of American painting, and who can blame him?

The fictional device he uses works well at first. Hope, herself a painter, is married to Jackson Pollock (Zack in the novel), before moving on to marriages or affairs with characters representing the other great artists of the period. Resilient, savvy and brittle with age, Hope is wonderfully drawn, and no hint of the usual retro-active feminism skews the picture.

Spunky as she is, she lived at a time when women were more likely to subside into supportive status, particularly if their man happened to be something of a genius. (As a small and redundant provocation, Updike tosses in the suggestion that prissily modern Kathryn will end up doing the same, though without the genius).

Hope's picture of Pollock - his drinking, his rages and retreat to the barn to drip out his famous paintings - is rawly alive, not least because of Updike's empathy with his subject.

In an account of the huge success of the exhibition of New American Painting when it toured Europe in 1959, the author's dogged patriotism surfaces: "They didn't know what had hit them, but they knew a bomb had gone off in their faces: freedom in action, baby. Only in America ... Hey, you want revolution? Here it is ... Surrealism without the smirk, abstraction without geometry, every painting a wrestle with God."

In a way, the book is an extended, dramatised review of the most brilliant and original era of American art, and, as you would expect, there are many clever and evocative passages. But this is meant to be a novel. For it to work, after Pollock, Hope would have to go to bed with the leading figures in Abstract Expressionism, then Pop art.

Sure enough, after Zack dies in his car crash, she has an affair with someone who seems to be a stand-in for Barnet Newman and Rothko. The problem then is how to cover Robert Rauschenberg (who did the bed thing almost half a century before Tracey), Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and - trickiest of all - Andy Warhol?

Updike's answer is to create a composite character, Guy Holloway. The pallor of the name assorts badly with a man who, in addition to moving briskly from style to style - Lichtenstein dots one day, Warholian drug films the next - has to be a loving family man and notsolatent homosexual. It doesn't work. In romans a clef we have to believe what we are seeing through the keyhole. When real-life artists are compounded into one, we don't.

Updike's own word-painting is luxuriantly impasted, and, if anything, the scene of the interview - a remote Vermont country house where Hope has retired - is overset. When she reaches for a parka you take cover, knowing that after every coat on the rack has been descriptively shot to pieces, the country shoes and wellies beneath will follow. And they do. Late Updike, like late Picasso, does it because he does it well, which is not reason enough for doing it.

Still, you are reluctant to complain. For all the novel's artifice and descriptive overload, you read on regardless. Idiomatic one instant, intellectual the next, loose-limbed then taut with high intelligence, there is a good helping here of that classless, classy prose that is America's great gift to writing.

Talented as he no doubt would have proved, be grateful Updike did not become an artist.