Such sweet swinging

Things might change now that the sleek Tiger Woods has brought a sudden gleam to the once-humdrum game, but in recent times golf has been anything but fashionable. Indeed it is one of the most uncool enthusiasms a would-be intellectual1 could imagine: a resonant byword for well-padded bourgeois complacency, sexist, racist, loaded with petty country-club snobberies and affectations, and sartorially ludicrous, with its silly check trousers and paunchy polo shirts.

This is probably one of the reasons why John Updike likes it. Capitalism's favourite game represents, among other things, a pleasant minor rebellion against the conventions of bohemia, a way of pooh-poohing the sometimes fastidious manners of the literary scene. Updike's prose always seems to wear a knowing, shrewd, mocking but tolerant smile - exactly the right club for the task in hand. Every now and then, trying unrealistically to fly the bunkers, he grips too hard and uses word like "transcendent" or "bliss", but he soon shrugs these mis-hits aside with a sheepish grin. He even seems to like the clothes, referring gleefully to the pleasures of "festive polyester" and swearing that any golfer, togged up in his or her new Nick Faldo stormwear or even newer Tiger Woods ultra-comfy stay-dri, feels "something knightly" about their attire.

Or perhaps Updike's fondness is driven simply by that age-old desire to belong to one of the few clubs that won't quite have him as a member. In this case the club is a nine-iron, and Updike unhesitatingly confesses to the various ways in which the club has jilted him:

"the thin skin that skims across the green like a wounded bird, the smothered hook which finds the raspberry patch, the soaring slice that crosses the highway, the chunked chip, the shanked approach, the water ball, the swamp ball, the deeper-into-the-woods ricochet, the trap-to-trap blast, the total whiff on the first tee, the double hit putt from two feet out."

Updike is, as we would expect, constantly alert to the comedy of the game that has him hooked. As it happens, the jacket photograph of the author in mid-drive does at first glance look like someone (in genuine "festive" Rupert Bear slacks) hauling in a fish. But the title is not a whim: golf feeds the fantasy life of its followers, encouraging them to believe that the occasional sweet hit is a glimpse of their true selves, and that routine mishaps are just passing imperfections, ripe for elimination. Whether taIking about the corpulent boasting that accompanies a friendly foursome, the greedy delusions that fill the bag of even the sheerest incompetents, or the haphazard sociology that riddles relations between players, caddies and wives, he enjoys tracing the gaps that separate the dream and the sometimes cheerless reality.

Golf Dreams includes short stories, extracts from novels, and essays from a range of magazines - some of them. Updike admits, "as deep in the literary rough as The Massachusetts Golfer". It is a treat both for Updike fans and for golf nuts, though how much of a crossover there is between these two groups is anyone's guess. There's a crafty pastiche of golf coaching manuals, an exquisite guide to the physical mechanics that go into drinking a cup of tea ("the angle made by the forearms should never exceed 110 degrees"). And there's a delicious rumination on the dazzling green luxury of televised golf ("one rises up from the sagging couch bloated by the manicured glory of the eucalyptus trees, or Georgia pines or royal palms, or whatever they were"). There are high, arching flights of fancy concerning swing thoughts, the moral aspects of golf, the etiquette of the gimme. And so on.

Oddly, the only dodgy lies are in the fiction - two short stories, and excerpts from the Rabbit novels. Updike pays tribute to the mastery of P G Wodehouse in this area, and is as supple and canny a writer. But Wodehouse was happy to let golf be the whole world. His heroes could enfold their beloveds "in a gentle embrace, using the interlocking grip." Updike's vocabulary flickers with the faded rhetoric of the clubhouse - there are "affable young ladies", autumn has "an especial beauty" - but his characters can't help being as worldly as the author. They crack jokes about George Bush; big-deal corporate thoughts invade and spoil their swings. Updike is right to see golf as a trip ("a non-chemical hallucinogen"), as an inviting and exclusive green field of dreams. But like the raucous spectators you see at tournaments nowadays, he brings the outside world onto the links with him. And sometimes the dream goes round the rim, with a gasp of disbelief, and stays out.