HAMLETS

Villages

By John Updike Knopf, 336 pp., $25

The title of John Updike's new novel promises immediate satisfactions. Mount Judge in the Rabbit tetralogy, Olinger in a cornucopia of shorter work, Basingstoke in "In the Beauty of the Lilies," and now the village of Willow, the small Pennsylvania settlement where his protagonist's life opens out. From the first, Updike has been, at his most enduring, our master chronicler of the life and times, the long post- World War II devolution, of small-town America and its harried, ever-hopeful middle-level population.

Elsewhere, as in forays into the Arizona desert ("A Month of Sundays"), the South American rain forest ("Brazil"), panoramic Boston seen from the top of the Pru ("Roger's Version"), the sprawl of south Florida ("Rabbit at Rest"), or, in "Toward the End of Time," a year of seasonal change in New England, Updike's prose evocations have regularly maintained a graphic artist's brilliance of definition. But it is on his home ground of southeastern Pennsylvania and its fictional surrogates that he has best exemplified Henry James's great rule of "saturation": writing so richly immersed in some birthright environment that it marries emotional conviction to the solidity of a detailed sociological treatise, whether or not the latter quality is any part of the author's purposes.

The several villages of this novel are presented as "sites of instruction," including, among others, the village-like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where our upwardly mobile hero, Owen Mackenzie, courts his first wife over discussions of advanced mathematics and the future of computer technology. Undergrad MIT stands surrogate for the author's Harvard College; more than in any previous book, even the neatly compartmented memoir, "Self-Consciousness," the trajectory of his protagonist's life tracks Updike's own.

"Villages," especially in flashbacks, is altogether the most directly autobiographical of all Updike's novels. The familiar elements are in place: the restless, irritable mother and worry-plagued father, the move from town to an isolated farmhouse, midlife divorce and "the pain [it] gave others," also the sense of never quite belonging to the places and privileges his talents have won for him. Of course there are differences. Owen's is a life spent not in writing books but in computer technology, its details traced with Updike's customary specificity from its crude 1950s beginnings (when Owen invents a system wittily named "Digit Eyes") to its extraordinary, and suffocating, latter-day refinements.

The village life Owen's history rises from remains in consciousness as a point of reference in all that follows. "Villages" offers, at least to older readers, the forgivable pleasures of nostalgia, as for a time when the small business establishments and eateries had not yet migrated to out-of-town shopping malls and the glamorous celebrities of Sunday-night broadcasting, Jack Benny and the rest, lived radio lives much like the life of one's own family and neighbors. That vanished pre-television world operates in the novel to set off Owen's rising discontent with the well-heeled, pleasure-avid society that success has lifted him into; a society where the high-church-sanctioned afterlife itself is imagined as just another country club. The portrait, in sum, is of a man who, as his life draws down, grows more and more detached from a world of vacuous affluence and ever-accelerating change; detached also from his own once-absorbing life-work (which happily is not the case with this bountifully prolific author).

Recollection, and sensory observation, regularly bring out Updike's noted gift for precise visual realization. A single phrase can nail down an unimprovable physical image or impression -- a walk through boyhood's back yard "past his grandfather's asbestos-shingled chicken house"; the "slight cozy stink of burning" emitted by a Lionel train set's "little black transformer box"; or (familiar to anyone traveling Connecticut's Interstate 84) the gold dome of Hartford's "spiky" capitol building, "as narrow as the band at the top of a pencil." Updike has been accused by detractors of over-fine writing, but he is that rare writer who never leaves us in doubt as to what his characters are passing through, what their lives are surrounded by.

Six of the book's 14 chapters are titled "Village Sex," about which there is little to say except that here, too, Updike is stylistically direct and precise, and that readers who consider this an unnatural preoccupation are in most cases disregarding the evidence of their own waking, or sleeping, imaginative consciousness. It is true that the number of explicit sexual encounters seems, in "Villages," to have reached a new high; and it is, one supposes, paradoxical that something bringing such excitement and pleasure into life when it willingly occurs can get to be so tiresome in repetitive retellings. But whatever tedium these repetitions my have brought on will break toward the end in a surge of narrative tension as intense as any Updike has ever managed, a dramatic crisis ending with a shock like the breaking of a thunderhead on a hot August afternoon.

The closing chapter is called "Village Wisdom," a title that may call attention to something insufficiently honored in Updike's writing: a certain rueful but forgiving intelligence and, yes, wisdom about the accumulating passages, overt and hidden, of ordinary human existence. "It is a mad thing, to be alive," the novel's last paragraph tells us. "Villages exist to moderate this madness." For Updike, too, in the business of getting through life and his remarkable and abundant life-work, it has "taken a village."

Warner Berthoff is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus on Harvard University's faculty of arts and sciences.