Prometheus Unsound

THE CENTAUR (299 pp.)--John Updike --Knopf ($4).

Once again Updike's comet--a blazing thesaurus trailed by an incandescence of reputation--is visible against the night sky. What wonders does it portend?

Very much the same kind of wonders as the last time around, the reader is likely to decide. In his third novel and sixth book, this 30-year-old author's prose is more than ever remarkable for its astonishing and somewhat studied brilliance. As before. Updike finds his way more accurately than almost anyone else now writing to the small touchstones of mind and memory; there is the little shock, and then yes, that is how first lust feels, how an auto repair shop tastes, how it is to wake up in a strange bed when it has snowed through the night. The author does this so well that the reader can find himself at the point of tears as he is prodded to recall (where are you now. Gwendolyn?) the kind of plastic cigarette case that high school girls used in 1947.

Updike can also create a character who does not leave the mind easily, and the title figure of The Centaur, a high school science teacher named Caldwell, is his best creation yet.

Stolen Fire. In the novel. Caldwell's life is recalled years later by his son Peter. Partly as metaphor, partly by metamorphosis in Peter's mind. Caldwell the science teacher becomes Chiron, in Greek mythology the wisest of the Centaurs. It was Chiron who taught the young heroes and godlings, and who, wounded by one of Hercules' poisoned arrows, longed for death, although he was immortal. Chiron was allowed death after he gave his immortality to Prometheus, who created man and stole fire for him from Olympus.

Caldwell's mortal wound comes from the indifference of students at Olinger (read Olympus) High, and the casual thunderings of its Principal Zimmerman (read Zeus). He is, moreover, tormented by the teasing lechery of Vera (Venus), the gym teacher, and the unreliability of his old Buick, which must be fixed by Vera's husband Hummel (Hephaestus), a cuckolded garage keeper.

Widening Awe. Through the author's elaborate literary construction, Caldwell-Chiron clumps on two feet or prances on four. In both shapes his portrait is memorable. The other god-teachers, too, are drawn with grace and wit. There is a wry. schoolboy truth in seeing Father Zeus as a capricious pedagogue who tyrannizes teachers and likes to fondle the shoulders of girl students.

But by using such a method to state a son's widening awe of a rare father, the author obliged himself not only to retell the beautiful Chiron myth, but to give at least some attention to Prometheus--even though his intent is not to translate myths into modern terms, but to illuminate a modern hero's death with myths. Updike slights Prometheus, and his book surfers. The reader learns little more than that Peter is bright, has psoriasis (the vulture's peck, presumably), and that as an adult he is a second-rate abstract painter with a Negro mistress.

If the author had not decided to tie his story to mythology, this could have been enough. In fact more than enough; the psoriasis might easily have been left out. As things stand, Updike's enormous, unbalanced metaphor eventually topples off the edge of audacity into preciousness.

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