Updike at Rest

John Updike's death isn't affecting me like Donald Westlake's or John Mortimer's or Studs Terkel's or Tony Hillerman's.  Westlake and Mortimer were my literary models at a key moment of my life.  Their styles and senses of humor got into my head and my writing.  Their characters became my friends.  Their books and stories are comforts as well as inspirations.  Terkel was a hero.  Hillerman just wrote books that I had a lot of fun reading.

Updike was...

Updike.

From the beginning.  He was a last name.  It was how I was introduced to him.

"Your assignment, class, is to read Updike's A&P."

"What are you reading, Dad?"

"Updike's new novel, Lance."

I read "A&P" in high school.  I read Rabbit, Run my freshman year in college.  It wasn't assigned.  One day I decided I needed to read more Updike---"Who's the best American writer?  Mailer?  Roth? Updike?"---and I walked down to the local bookstore and bought it.  I didn't feel particularly grown-up or sophisticated.  I felt furtive and anxious and guilty.  I was skipping a class I hadn't done the homework for and spending money I should have put towards paying my phone bill.  Buying the book made me feel like I was running away from something only to run right smack into it.  I read it in one sitting and realized that before I even knew his story I was feeling like Rabbit Angstrom.

I never got over that feeling and I think it kept me at a distance from Updike's fiction.

But it was a distance I've always had to close.

I think Updike never wrote a bad sentence but he wrote a lot of bad novels.  He wrote many great short stories, a ton of wonderful essays, more bad poetry than good, and the Rabbit series, Roger's Version, and Month of Sundays, novels that spooked me and continue to haunt me.

As I said, I don't feel about Updike's death the same way I felt about those other writers'.  I don't feel as personal a loss.  I feel a loss to the community I live in.  It's as if I was walking past a beautiful old Congregationalist church at the center of town that I attended irregularly and learned from the sexton weeping on the steps that the pastor had died and the bishop had decided to shutter the church forever.

Or...it's as if that church was a landmark in a very small self-circumscribed world and that I've walked over there expecting to attend the service and found the church and the piece of ground it occupied torn away, like a section from a map, and all is chaos and void where the church used to stand and the world now feels smaller and shakier, less solid and less real.

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More from James Wolcott.

Turns out TBogg and I had similar feelings about Updike and about Rabbit Angrstrom.

Comments

[Apostate]

Roth? Seriously? Updike, sexist ass as he was, could at least turn a phrase. Roth is a really bad writer and a misogynist to boot. I'm surprised he hasn't been able to work out his issues with women with a therapist; oh, silly me, why should be bother, if he can make tons of money writing bad novels about his hangups. Sorry, that should be novel - one novel over and over and over again.

[Scott Lemieux]

Great post, thanks!

[Bill Altreuter]

I wonder whether anyone will read Updike in 20 years. It seems to me that the greatest pleasure he gave me was when I'd come across a story in the New Yorker. My practice is read the magazine cover-to-cover, and there have been many times when I'd be reading a piece of fiction and thought, "Huh. This is good-- who's it by?" The answer was frequently Updike, although I can't say that I've ever had the impulse to re-read anything I came across that way.

I liked his reviews too. He was an honest broker when appraising other people's work, even though his review often contained better writing that the work he was describing.

His great subject-- life in late 20th Century middle-class America-- is most of our lives, and I think you are right about the feeling "Rabbit Run" evokes, but Updike didn't feel personal to me. When Mailer died, I thought I'd lost a friend, but the stuff Mailer wrote about wasn't really connected to my life, except to the extent that Mailer was all about having an imaginary larger than life existence. For all of the glories of his prose, Updike's world was a bleak, depressing place to inhabit. He described it beautifully, but the people who lived in it didn't enjoy it as much as he enjoyed writing about it.

Oh, and Apostate-- Roth is the real deal, with range and complexity and depth. He has certainly produced his share of bad books, but he has also produced things that are unlike anything done by any other American writer. In my view he is the 20th Century American novelist that most deserves the Nobel, and the fact that Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow were tapped for this recognition while Roth has not been is one of the classic instances of the Swedish Academy getting it wrong.

[dave]

"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" pwns. End of story.

[dave]

"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" pwns. End of story.