Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
Updike le Noir
By John Thompson
The Coup
by John Updike
Knopf, 299 pp., $8.95
Military cartographers sometimes employ a device called an 'overlay,' a sketch on transparent paper of some special feature such as the deployment of artillery batteries; placed atop a regular map of the area and keyed to it, the overlay thus easily becomes part of the real map itself. Overlying those regions our atlases of Africa call Chad and Niger, their borders straight-edged over desert and mountain by some nineteenth-century colonial administrator in Paris and mapped still that way today even though de Gaulle decamped almost twenty years ago, there lies the country of Kush, 126,912,180 hectares of 'delicate, delectable emptiness,' with twenty-two miles of railroad, one hundred seven of paved highway, ground-nut plantations, some millet, sorghum, cotton, yams, dates, tobacco, and indigo; the blue nomad Tuareg slavers in the mountains to the north, fearsome riverine animists to the south, two Boeing 727s, an Islamic Marxist dictator who calls himself Colonel Ellelloû, an imprisoned king, a disastrous five-year drought that is causing its population (of the density of .03 per hectare) to starve, an ample treasury of diseases; a vast white and green Palais d'Administration modeled on the Louvre, and no more elephants at all: John Updike, sole owner and proprietor.
Review, 1924 words
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