Odd Jobs by John Updike

chewing [an episode, owing nothing to the novel, in which Jack Nicholson, as the devil-figure Darryl Van Horne, torments the excessively fertile Michelle Pfeiffer by biting into a ripe pomegranate that, in perfect illustration of the principle of sympathetic magic, transfers a griping agony to her uterus]. The less it resembled my book, the better I felt. And something about the war between the sexes did carry over, in quite different form. It is not a movie I would see twice but I did sit through to the end, whereas I couldn’t make myself read the script at all.”

ENVIRONS
Fictional Houses
    N OT ONLY do fictional characters have to be supplied with faces and life histories, speech rhythms and psychologies; they must have houses to live in:
    By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of the early stage of Classic Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the manorial hall upon a small estate.… Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof the chimneys were panelled or columnar, some coped gables with finials and like features still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction.
    Hardy had been trained as an architect, and in
Far from the Madding Crowd
has no trouble embowering his heroine with a solidity subtly proportionate to her worth as a mate, and in agreeably animating her inherited home’s interior: “Lively voices were heard this morning in the upper rooms, the main staircase to which was of hard oak, the balusters, heavy as bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint fashion of their century, the handrail as stout as a parapet-top, and the stairs themselves continually twisting round like a person trying to look over his shoulder.” Our story takes place, we are made certainly to feel, in enduring settings that long predate and will long outlast these momentary actors; Hardy’s most ardent evocation is of the stone barn, four centuries old:
    Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout.… The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten archstones and chamfers, the orientation of the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed.…
    To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers’ operations, which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion.
    History of a more hurried, borrowed sort shapes the home of Mrs. Manson Mingott, so daringly located (in the 1870s) above New York’s 34th Street: “The house in itself was already a historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fireplaces with black marble mantels, and immense glazed bookcases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire.” Edith Wharton’s splendid eye for decor was not blind to the potential oppression of the correct and the expected; Mrs. Mingott, though immobilized by obesity, is one of the few free spirits in
The Age of Innocence
. The novel’s hero, Newland Archer, nearly swoons at the Countess Olenska’s unconventional room appointments, her “small slender tables of dark wood” and stretch of red damask: “The