White Mischief

By -- R.Z. Sheppard

THE COUP

by John Updike

Knopf; 298 pages; $8.95

Like a hermit crab, John Updike inhabits old but serviceable forms: the novel, short story and light verse, the Christian church, a duly consecrated marriage (his second) and a 19th century Massachusetts farmhouse. Both the artist and the man have discovered the vital irritants and ironic satisfactions of the familiar and traditional. His body of work grows with impressive regularity. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a fixed star at The New Yorker. Yet many critics have called him irrelevant, accused him of having nothing to say and proffered the supreme lefthanded compliment, "uncommonly readable.'"

Updike had his turn in Bech: A Book, a satire about literary politics and pretensions. At the same time he acceded to the practical need for bestselling popularity with Couples and prepared to meet relevance. He did, in 1971, by slipping a black-power radical into the pages of Rabbit Redux. He was not alone. Saul Bellow and even the reticent Bernard Malamud felt compelled to explore in fiction their feelings about those other, threatening Americans.

In The Coup, Updike widens the horizons of this exploration. In effect, he puts on black face and tap dances with breathtaking agility and grace through the contradictions of culture clash and leadership in a revolutionary African nation. The mythic Islamic country of Kush resembles France's former real estate in West Africa, with a touch of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia.

This land "of delicate, delectable emptiness," named for a vanished biblical kingdom, is also rife with American influence. Racial mixing can produce beautiful results; cultural miscegenation tends toward ludicrous juxtapositions. The snap of bubble gum is heard in the Koran school. Fashionably oversize sunglasses are worn by women in purdah while their denimed daughters in platform shoes kick up the dust in the streets of Istiqlal, the capital. Down in the slums the click of cal abashes and the muezzin's call to prayer compete with an alien rhythm, "with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant, that seemed to say. Chuff, chuff/ do it to me, baby,/ do it, do it,/ Momma don't mind what Daddy say."

To Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou, Kush's Muslim-Marxist President, such imports are ideological and theological blasphemies. Yet Ellellou himself has had his head turned by the West. At 17, he left his native village to join the French colo nial army. He served in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu and spent the middle '50s studying liberal arts in Wisconsin. Back home, married to a white college sweet heart, Ellellou rose through the ranks under a French-puppet king and then emerged as the leader of the coup that put him in power.

Narrated by Ellellou, deposed and comfortably exiled in the South of France, the story has that sad, ironical tone of dis location found in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. "All their languages were second languages . . . clumsy masks their thoughts must put on," are among Updike's Nabokovian touches.

Small, black and physically unimpressive, Ellellou can roam his parched land in virtual anonymity, at least when he leaves his silver Mercedes. He is essentially and purposely a faceless character, an ineffectual ruler who cannot symbolize the absolute authority of the old king and does not have the pragmatic instincts of his successors. "Our President," says one, "rules by mystical dissociation of sensibility."

In fact, that sensibility is frequently in distinguishable from Updike's gilded-gesso prose, a doge's palace of words that are as unexpectedly suited to fill the dreaded emptiness of Kush as they did the drab streets of Olinger, the fictional setting of some of the author's earlier stories.

Updike has visited Africa and now uses it as a vast removed stage on which to stretch his audacious talents. His descriptions of Kush indicate he could be one of our finest travel writers. His scenes of Ellellou and his four wives again demonstrate that he is the master of reproducing the cold exchanges and icy silences of domestic warfare. His control of bizarre episodes--a U.S. AID adviser immolated atop a shipment of Kix Trix Chex Pops, Russian missile experts rollicking like Kievstone Kops, a severed head turned into a Disneyesque talking relic--steers him clear of gratuitous black humor.

Above all, The Coup exhibits Updike's boundless sense of play. It allows him to entertain serious questions, without the turgidness of writers who solemnly subcribe to the high-moral fiber diet. Updike, a former "Talk of the Town" writer for The New Yorker, now moves out to cover the Talk of the World.

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