An Appraisal
A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries
Robert Spencer for The New York Times
John Updike at the Boston Public Library in 2006.
More Photos > Published: January 27, 2009
Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor,
John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.
Mr. Updike’s four keenly observed Rabbit novels (“Rabbit, Run,” 1960; “Rabbit Redux,” 1971; “Rabbit Is Rich,” 1981; and “Rabbit at Rest,” 1990) chronicled the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom — high school basketball star turned car salesman, householder and errant husband — and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (from feminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled his cozy nest. Harry, who self-importantly compared his own fall from grace to this country’s waning power, his business woes to the national deficit, was both a representative American of his generation and a kind of scientific specimen — an index to the human species and its propensity for doubt and narcissism and self immolation.
In fulfilling Stendhal’s classic definition of a novel as “a mirror that strolls along a highway,” reflecting both the “blue of the skies” and “the mud puddles underfoot,” the Rabbit novels captured four decades of middle-class American life. Mr. Updike’s stunning and much underestimated 1996 epic, “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” tackled an even wider swath of history. In charting the fortunes of an American family through some 80 years, the author showed how dreams, habits and predilections are handed down generation to generation, parent to child, even as he created a kaleidoscopic portrait of this country from its nervous entry into the 20th century to its stumbling approach to the millennium.
Producing roughly a book or so a year, Mr. Updike tried throughout his career to stretch his imagination. To the novels starring Rabbit — perhaps the self Mr. Updike might have been had he not become a writer — he added a series of books about Bech, another alter ego described as a “recherché but amiable” Jewish novelist afflicted with acute writer’s block. While Bech boasted a modest oeuvre of seven books and remained a second-string cult author, his creator was blessed, as he once wrote of Nabokov, with an “ebullient creativity,” and his work, too, gave the happy impression of “a continuous task carried forward variously, of a solid personality, of a plentitude of gifts explored, knowingly.”
In other novels, Mr. Updike ventured even farther afield. “The Centaur” (1963) infused Joycean myth into its tender portrait of a well-meaning schoolteacher. “The Coup” (1978) conjured up an imaginary African kingdom called Kush and its imperial leader Colonel Ellelloû. And “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) and its sequel, “The Widows of Eastwick” (2008), depicted heroines who were supernatural sorceresses with the power to conjure and maim. These experiments did not always work. “S.” (1988) used Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” as a jumping-off point for a crude attack on feminists. “Seek My Face” (2002) devolved into a ham-handed and thoroughly unconvincing improvisation on the life of Jackson Pollock. And “Brazil” (1994), brimming over with undigested research and bad dialogue, stood as an embarrassing effort to translate the Tristan and Iseult legend to South America.
Indeed Mr. Updike’s strongest work remained tethered to the small town and suburban worlds he knew firsthand, just as many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech’s concern that he was “a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,” or Colonel Ellelloû’s lament that “we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.” Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God — looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with “its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.”
But if their yearnings after salvation pulled them in one direction, Mr. Updike’s heroes also found themselves tempted by sex and romantic misalliances in the here and now. Caught on the margins of a changing morality, unable to forget the old pieties and taboos and yet unable to resist the 60’s promise of sex without consequences, these men vacillate between duty and self-fulfillment, a craving for roots and a hungering after freedom. As the author himself once put it, his heroes “oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one — to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves.”
Although Mr. Updike’s earliest stories could sound self consciously writerly and derivative — at their worst, O’Hara without the bite, Cheever without the magic — he soon found his own inimitable voice with “Pigeon Feathers” and “Rabbit, Run.” Over the years, the stories and novels tended to track Mr. Updike’s own life: couples wooed and wed and went their separate ways, and the hormonal urges of youth slowly became the quiescence of middle age.
In a series of overlapping stories about Joan and Richard Maple (collected in “Too Far to Go”), Mr. Updike created an indelible two-decade-long portrait of a marriage, chronicling how one couple created and then dismantled a life together, while tracing the imprint that time and age left on their relationship. Many of his later stories and novels seemed preoccupied with mortality and the ravages of time, featuring characters grappling with the looming prospect of their own demise with a mixture of anger, grace and resignation and looking back upon their youth in an often cloudy rear view mirror.
As for Mr. Updike’s collections of nonfiction (including “Hugging the Shore,” “Odd Jobs” and “Due Considerations”), they not only showcased his copious gifts as a critic — as a celebrant of other artists’ work and a sometimes acerbic literary anthropologist — but they also attested to his compulsion to enclose between the covers of a book every snippet of his work. These volumes featured thoughtful musings on contemporaries like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, and erudite essays on masters like Melville and Hawthorne, but they also included such effluvia as picture captions the author wrote for a Playboy spread on Marilyn Monroe and dutiful responses to questions posed by magazines (“What is your favorite spot in and around Harvard?”).
In one of these collections, Mr. Updike summed up his love of his vocation: “From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”
Excerpts
A Sampler of John Updike’s Prose
Published: January 28, 2009
We recently had a carpenter build a few things in our house in the country. It’s an old house, leaning away from the wind a little; its floors sag gently, like an old mattress. The carpenter turned his back on our tilting walls and took his vertical from a plumb line and his horizontal from a bubble level, and then went to work by the light of these absolutes. Fitting his planks into place took a lot of those long, irregular, oblique cuts with a ripsaw that break an amateur’s heart. The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.
From “Assorted Prose.”
•
A barn, in a day, is a small night. The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest. David entered silently, the gun in one hand.... The small of old straw scratched his sinuses.... the mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming — coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel — hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood. He stood stock-still a minute; it took a while to separate the cooing of the pigeons from the rustling in his ears. When he had focused on the cooing, it flooded the vast interior with its throaty, bubbling outpour: there seemed no other sound. They were up behind the beams. What light there was leaked through the shingles and the dirty glass windows at the far end and the small round holes, about as big as basketballs, high on the opposite stone side walls, under the ridge of the roof.
From the story “Pigeon Feathers.”
•
The court, clay, had come through its first winter pitted and windswept bare of redcoat. Years ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a dramatic home improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own worst crisis had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen renovation. Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers gaily churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun. The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding sensation as if the bed were being tipped, Richard found the barren tennis court — its net and tapes still rolled in the barn — an environment congruous with his mood of purposeful desolation, and the crumbling of handfuls of clay into cracks and holes (dogs had frolicked on the court in a thaw; rivulets had eroded trenches) an activity suitably elemental and interminable. In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.
From the story “Separating.” Updike’s Stories: Some Paths Traveled, Some Not Taken
By
BRUCE WEBER“Rabbit, Run” (1960); “Rabbit Redux” (1971); “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981); “Rabbit at Rest” (1990)
This tetralogy, a chronicle of four decades in the life of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a former high school basketball star who became a salesman, is likely to be Mr. Updike’s most enduring legacy. Rabbit, like Mr. Updike, grew up in a small Pennsylvania town (though, unlike the author, he didn’t leave), and in him Mr. Updike seems to have imagined the man he would have been if he hadn’t become a writer. Its great achievement is in placing Rabbit in a keenly observed American context, portraying a man in various stages of his life and also the nation he lives in.
“Assorted Prose” (1965)
This first collection of Mr. Updike’s incidental pieces — book reviews, parodies, autobiographical ruminations and short essays (including the classic piece about the final game played by Ted Williams at Fenway Park, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”) — gave evidence of the remarkable versatility he would exhibit throughout his career and showed off many of the qualities that came to be associated with his non-fiction: a generosity toward other artists; a capacious range of interests; a keen eye; and a joy in cleverness.
“Couples” (1968)
Mr. Updike’s scrutiny of an exurban community was almost sociological in its depiction of the habits, rituals and behavior of its inhabitants, but the book was best known for its frankness about sex, about which Mr. Updike never ceased being curious.
“Bech, a Book”(1970); “Bech Is Back” (1982); “Bech at Bay” (1998)
Like Rabbit, Henry Bech is an alter-ego, a Jewish writer with a long and varied career, someone Mr. Updike might have been had he not been a gentile who avoided the New York scene. The Bech books constitute a wryly caricaturish collective profile of Mr. Updike’s Jewish contemporaries, like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, as well as a reflection on himself: the kind of writer he wasn’t.
“The Coup” (1978); “The Witches of Eastwick” (1983); “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000)
Mr. Updike was hardly a navel-gazer, however, and a distinct strain in his work involved extravagant acts of research and imagination. In novels like “The Coup,” which was set in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s; “Witches,” which posited the existence of Salem-esque magic-power-endowed shrews in contemporary New England; and “Gertrude,” an imagined prequel, more or less, to “Hamlet,” he set his prowess at social observation loose in exotic land- and mindscapes.
“In the Beauty of Lilies” (1996)
A saga of one American family over four generations and most of the 20th century, this is perhaps the novel that best tied together Mr. Updike’s close-to-home fictional themes — including the self-conscious American character, the religious strain in American life and the social and sexual patterns in American communities — with the world beyond his neighborhood.
BRUCE WEBER
AT LUNCH WITH/John Updike;On Reading, Writing And Rabbit
By CLYDE HABERMAN
HOW clever of Alfred A. Knopf to have put his publishing house not far from the spot where a gastronomic shrine would one day rise. Because of his foresight, John Updike, decades later, had to walk only a few steps to reach Lutece.
The people at Knopf had sent their prized author off to the restaurant, on East 50th Street, not only to make sure that he had a good meal but also to provide a reasonably quiet place for him to hold forth on life, food, writing, religion -- whatever -- and maybe, while he was at it, to chat up his latest novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," a sweeping tale of 20th-century America.
The old editors at Knopf loved Lutece," Mr. Updike said as the waiter served coffee, for him decaffeinated. "There was sort of a symbiosis between the Knopf editorial board and Lutece." Then he lowered his voice just enough to lend the table, briefly, the air of a confessional. "I've never felt comfortable in here," he allowed. "I feel gourmet food is sort of wasted on me."
A sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice will do for lunch when he is at home, on 11 isolated acres in Beverly Farms, Mass., about 25 miles north of Boston. At this point, Mr. Updike said, he has to watch his waistline almost as much as his language.
"There's no disguising the fact that a writer's life is a sedentary one and prone to incessant snacking if you work at home," he said. "The little break of going down to get another oatmeal cookie is almost irresistible. So I try to make up for the cookies by not eating much at lunch."
Even when he was a boy in Shillington, Pa., outside the working-class town of Reading, literature and food converged. "I was a great peanut-butter lover from childhood on," he recalled. "The way I used to read was, we had an old sofa in the house, and I'd make a sandwich consisting of peanut butter and raisins. You'd eat one of those while you read John Dickson Carr or some other mystery writer, or James Thurber or Robert Benchley. In that way, many a happy afternoon went by."
But that was then. Fast-forwarding, Mr. Updike said: "It's no joke when you're 63 going on 64. What you eat begins to catch up to you."
Let it be noted that he held up fine under the gustatory strain of Lutece, polishing off a serving of grouper after a cup of pumpkin soup and a puff pastry of sweetbreads and spinach. He did draw the line at dessert.
Approaching the doorstep of his winter years, John Updike looks in person as he has for so long in photographs -- tall and lean, with that familiar shock of white hair, thick eyebrows and cheeks that fold back from a dominant nose, making his face resemble a ship's prow. Thanks to regular workouts on a treadmill and persistent attempts, not successful of late, to get his golf handicap below 18, his health is good, he said. On this February afternoon, though, he showed up for lunch with a Band-Aid on the back of his right hand.
A cut?
No, a doctor had just removed a small cancerous lesion.
That sounds worrisome.
Not really, Mr. Updike said, waving off concern with the damaged hand.
"I have a lot of skin cancers," he said. "I happen to have a condition called psoriasis. Wish I didn't, but I've had it since I was quite small. The only way to cure it was to go to the sun. So I moved to a town with a beach, and I used to go to the Caribbean once a winter -- lie there and roast myself. Now it's all showing up in the form of skin cancers.
"But they cut them out with great aplomb, and there's always a little bit of me left."
There is certainly more than enough of Mr. Updike left to keep him a towering figure in American letters, a rich voice heard in an astounding flow -- a torrent, really -- of novels, poetry, short stories, essays and literary criticism. In this young year, he has already appeared repeatedly in The New Yorker, which has published him since shortly after he graduated from Harvard University in 1954. Recent topics were as varied as Lana Turner and paranoid modern packaging that makes it almost impossible to get at the aspirin or the salted peanuts.
And there's the new novel, his 17th, which marches across this American century through the lives of four generations of a middle-class Protestant family -- home territory for Mr. Updike. Its florid title, a stylistic departure from the punchiness favored in his other books, is borrowed from a stanza of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free! While God is marching on.
"In the Beauty of the Lilies," Michiko Kakutani wrote in a New York Times review, "is not only Mr. Updike's most ambitious novel to date but arguably his finest: a big, generous book, narrated with Godlike omniscience and authority and populated by a wonderfully vivid cast of dreamers, wimps, social climbers, crackpots and lost souls."
Truth be told, not every critic has been so enthralled. Then again, Updike works have taken it on the chin at times almost from the start, with Knopf's publication of "The Poorhouse Fair" in 1959 and then, a year later, "Rabbit, Run," whose hero continued his run for three more novels, until laid to rest in 1990. "Without Rabbit, I would be a very obscure author indeed," Mr. Updike said. "If you look at the literary prizes I've won, they've almost all been given to Rabbit books."
When it comes to less-than-favorable reviews, Mr. Updike shrugs.
"What can you do?" he said. "A lot depends on what the guy had for dinner and all sorts of irrational factors. I became a reviewer in part to assuage my sense of indignation about some of the reviews I've got, so that I would sort of show what a fair review should be."
In the new novel, movies and religion intertwine. It is the celluloid image that holds the modern promise of eternal life. Movie houses and their flickering light shape communal values as powerfully as churches.
"The movie theater and the church often existed side by side in small towns," Mr. Updike said, harking back to his boyhood, in pre-television days, when he distributed fliers for the Shillington movie house in return for free passes. "The old Hollywood movies were very pious in a way. The general sense was of a moral code that was enforced as you watched. Sins were punished almost in exact proportion to their seriousness, and virtue was rewarded with happy endings. In many ways, the movies carried religious weight."
He admits to having long had a crush on -- are you ready? -- Doris Day ("There it is -- out in the open!") and to wishing he had Errol Flynn's "masculine grace" (alas, "no Errol Flynn, I"). So strong were screen influences that, as a teen-ager in the 1940's, he entertained the idea of becoming a Walt Disney animator.
How different that era was from these days of the little screen.
"I don't like videos," Mr. Updike said dismissively. "There's something squalid about a video store. The people look furtive, like drug addicts, as they take them out in stacks of four and five. It's like people who drink alone. It's one thing to drink at a party, another thing to drink alone. One thing to go to an assembly hall and watch big illusions, another thing to take them home in a little can. It seems not playing the game."
Playing the game in modern publishing means, even for John Updike, having to take to the road to hawk one's work. As book tours go, this one involved little heavy lifting -- a weeklong venture, spent mostly in the Northeast. Still, it was a far cry from his early years, when he believed that books should sell themselves.
"If I had character, I'm sure I could say no to promotion tours," he said. "Thomas Pynchon says no. The late John Hersey said no. Anonymous says no." But Mr. Updike goes along out of a sense of obligation to Knopf. Occasionally, his journeys take him to college campuses for talks about writing, but that's only "when I'm cornered."
"I'm not really a good teacher because I don't really want to encourage younger writers," he said. "Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. Do they talk about encouraging younger actresses? No. You don't want any younger actress to come along and outshine you."
As Mr. Updike sipped his coffee, other Lutece customers walked by his table and, matter-of-factly, glanced his way. No offense, but here was a literary giant, and the well heeled, and now well fed, showed no obvious signs of recognition.
"That's good," he said. "You don't want to be a celebrity. It cuts your privacy, doesn't it? And a writer needs some sense of blending in and being a witness. The sad truth of it is that the writing game is low on the celebrity totem pole."
Oh yeah? What about the hot publishing figure of the moment, Joan Collins?
Mr. Updike laughed. "The newly famous writer," he said. "Well, I guess she showed Random House a thing or two. In a way, it serves them right. It illustrates the folly of greedy contract-making on both sides."
Postcoffee, the conversation drifted, but it made its way back to his new novel and its theological cast just as the waiter brought the check. It was good timing. Picking up the bill at Lutece is enough to make anyone get religion.
Yes, Mr. Updike is a believing Christian. "I've been lucky, really," he said. "It would be unkind of me not to be somewhat religious. It would be ungrateful."
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