Madrigals from a Rare Bird

THE MUSIC SCHOOL by John Updike. 260 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Between those who speak with the tongues of men (and write novels) and those who speak with the tongues of angels (and write poems) there is an intermediate semiterrestrial type who write short stories.

John Updike, who writes both poetry and novels, is at his best in the short story, where his mastery of the artistic ecology to which he was born is unstrained by the demands of the long migratory flights of the novel. A rare and precious bird is he, protected by the wardens of The New Yorker magazine, who might justly feel that if it were not for them, such gaudy songbirds might die out for having no place to perch, let alone feed. All 20 of Updike's new collection have been published in that magazine.

These pieces show Updike at his best: his style is exquisitely crafted, his ear is sound, his eye is sharp, and the words dance like water over bright pebbles. If some of the stories fail, it is because they are echoes rather than original noises. The effect is rather like listening to a whole evening of madrigals.

Sometimes the Updike stories echo not only themselves but other voices by other specialists. The Family Meadow, for example, could be an unconscious transcription of John Cheever's The Day the Pig Fell into the Well; it is a memorable elegy to a family at its high point of felicity, caught at the moment before its dissolution. Yet the story is Updike's own; it is clearly his identifiably New Jersey-Pennsylvania family he is writing about, and the note he sounds is ironic; so far, he has left others to blow the tragic basses.

The title story, The Music School, makes a lyric out of churchgoing in Pennsylvania Dutch country. It also succeeds in the tricky business of interweaving the self-questioning of a troubled young father undergoing analysis with a description of the significance of the Eucharist. At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie could easily have been just another set piece about a raffish gin mill in which just about every type turns up but the anonymous and unseen narrator. Actually, it is a tense little moral essay on true and false innocence, demonstrated in terms of a hat with dancing birds on it. The hat has been made by a homosexual for a fancy-dress party, and now a child wants the campy millinery as a toy.

Theme is the young writer's problem, and at 34 John Updike might be called a veteran young writer. His talent has been recognized and treasured since he was old enough to vote. He is no longer transfixed by the pool of childhood memories, but has become interested in the faces looking over the shoulder of Narcissus. There he should find a novelist's theme to match his virtuosity.

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