Now that he's dead, I make a last attempt to like Updike

Gertrude and Claudius ***1/2
By John Updike

Queen Gertrude has been married to King Hamlet for 30-some years, an arranged affair she was bullied into as a teenager by her father for the usual dynastic reasons. Her seeming placidity with this arrangement hides the fact that she is bored, bored, BORED doing needlework and reading French romances in the solar, and doesn't much like her only son, Prince Hamlet, a sarcastic little creep now 30 and still avoiding real life by hanging out in grad school, or its medieval equivalent, in Wittenberg. (Updike wasn't the only one to parley the Hamlet story into some money. Late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley made some cha-ching off "Hamlet" in the poster left. Click on the pic to visit Beardsley at Find A Grave, your one-stop source for finding the final resting places and obits of your favorite celebs. Updike's over there, too.)

In cold Elsinore, Gertrude wonders what she might have done had her life been more self-directed, and she decides to explore that via an affair with the king's brother, Claudius, who is a rich world traveler, urbane, and has always had an eye for her.

Gertrude bullies the treacherous Polonius--the novel's best character--into letting her use his isolated lodge (with stuff he's fleeced from Elsinore) as a love nest. Still desirable to her husband, Gertrude discovers that her affair with Claudius adds zing to her marriage. Having two lovers gives her a sexual power that she enjoys wielding.

Clearly Updike intends his story to be sympathetic a) to medieval women used as marriage pawns and b) to women on the cusp of menopause who wonder what it would be like to cut loose just one last time.

But while it’s true that desire doesn’t fade with face and figure, most women in their 50s have the intelligence not to waste their time and energy on trying to fan the flames of adolescent lusts. One yearns to tell Gertrude to quit reading those French bodice-rippers, break up with Claudius, and take up some kind of social cause. For all its feminist veneer, Gertrude is more Updike's idea of a middle-aged fun-bunny (he was 60 when he wrote this novel) than a real reflection of women in middle age.

More interesting than the book's half-baked feminist slant is the way Updike uses both Shakespeare’s play and its source material for the novel, making the book both a stand-alone story and an exegesis of Shakespeare's play. Which is clever, but it doesn't really help the novel.

For instance, many characters have three names--Gerutha the girl becomes Geruthe the lover, and finally Gertrude, Claudius's queen--because their names in the various sources for the play have different names. The name changes introduce each of the three phases of Gertrude's life in the novel, so I suppose that's an allowable literary device, though my cynicism about Updike makes me wonder whether it's also a chance for the author to show off his knowledge of primary sources.

Updike, to his credit, takes care to use some of Shakespeare's diction--"rotten," "reechy" and "bodkin" appear at interesting junctures in the text. But--and this is always my personal problem with Updike--his depiction of human passion is often deeply repellent. Here for instance, a jealous Claudius tells Gertrude, just come from King Hamlet's bed, "I should beat you. I should pound the pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut."

Lovely.

And there's more in this vein, but some of you may have just had your breakfast.

R.I.P., author. I really did try to like you.