Kush, an imagined sub-Saharan country in Africa, a poor peanut-producing territory once ruled by the French under the name of Noire, is the improbable setting for John Updike's uncharacteristic new novel, "The Coup" …, and he has taken immense pains to make the territory tangible in some dazzling passages of physical description and recreation. "The Coup" is really more fable than novel. At first reading, it seems to be a number of books in one, and veers abruptly from the lyrical to the intensely declarative to the hilarious, from character to caricature; but it has a high moral point of view, and some exotic set pieces, which contrive to move it toward the fabulous. Updike has become the most Nabokovian of writers—who else takes the trouble to make such beautifully modulated sentences, or gives prose in general the carefully observed attention more commonly given to poetry? "The Coup" purports to be the memoirs of Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû,… an account of the events leading to his fall, and sometimes a passionate, rueful tract on the post-revolutionary world…. (p. 65)
Updike most brilliantly contrives in language this struggle going on in Ellelloû, so that the reader is constantly aware of it. In his rather pompous piety, Ellelloû cites verses from the Koran, graceful and measured in their phrasing and wisdom. When a flat American cadence intrudes into the text, as it does increasingly, the effect is like a blow. It is, plainly, the language of the infidel. When Ellelloû goes to call on his second wife, Candace, whom he brought back to Kush from Franchise, and she greets him with the phrase "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," we wince. It is in language that Updike most clearly dramatizes his worlds in collision—the wild, untouchable natural world of Kush and the banal know-how of its ultimate colonizers—and it is in language, his true province, that the book is made to happen. It would do no service to "The Coup" to enumerate Updike's rich cast of minor characters, or the dramatic events he sets up to revel in, for the book ought to stay as an astonishment to his readers. Memorably, Kush lives. Call "The Coup" a caper, an indulgence, a tract, a chronicle, a fable—and it is all these things at different times—the fact is that Updike's sentences can be read with the pleasure that poetry can, and the fingers are more than enough to count the novelists of whom such a thing can be said. (pp. 66, 69)
Alastair Reid, "Updike Country," in The New Yorker (© 1978 by the New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), December 25, 1978, pp. 65-9.
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