Category: John Updike

As I’ve noted in a couple of places, I’ve been reading John Updike‘s Couples, so hearing the news of his death yesterday has been doubly disorienting to me. I’ve always had an affection for his work (I seem to be unusual among many commentators in preferring his fiction to his criticism), so I feel just as sad about his death as anyone, but there’s something strange to go from hearing the news to reading the closing pages of that 1968 novel; it only emphasizes the fact that few writers were so good at writing about our foibles, about how we struggle with sex and religion and family, but the elegance of his writing never meant he went easy on his characters.

I saw Updike speak for the first time last May—he was giving a speech about American art at the Warner Theatre. (A blog post I wrote about the event for the Washington City Paper has a link to the text of the speech.) The event was put together by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which meant that it had a sort of affair-of-state import to it—a color guard and everything. It was reassuring to me to see a novelist get treated with that kind of gravitas. Who gets to be the recipient of that kind of treatment now? Ten years from now?

A lot of links and appreciations are making the rounds. I don’t want to add much more to the noise, but a few links of note:

Christianity Today points to some of its theologically driven features and interviews with Updike.

Erica Wagner‘s fine appreciation in the London Times: “Whether the reader thinks his frank style is tongue-in-cheek, rococo or simply always in contention for a Bad Sex Award depends on your perspective but Updike was in the vanguard of writers who kicked down the door of American bedrooms everywhere.”

The Harvard Crimson reports out Updike’s college days.

Karen Vanuska digs up Updike’s first published piece in the New Yorker.

A contemporary review of Couples in the Nation, which if nothing else speaks to the backlash the success of the novel engendered. (Yes, it’s long, with a lot of characters to keep track of, but to say that there’s “no tension between him and his subject, no stylistic consistency, and no interest for the reader” is overstating things badly.)

Thomas Mallon: “Perhaps the keenest compliment one can pay him as a man is to say that his life will make for a lousy biography.” (That said, Self-Consciousness is a very compelling memoir.)

Joel Achenbach writes an appreciation of Updike that expresses his disappointment in last year’s The Widows of Eastwick, but: “it had its rewards, not least of which was seeing Updike channel the diminished dreams and chronic pains of his aging characters. The reader thinks: So that’s what it’s like, getting old.”

I haven’t read much of John Updike‘s recent work—the shallowness of Terrorist, combined with the middling-to-scathing reviews of many of his other recent books, has sent me in other directions. But I still root for the man, partly because his Rabbit novels had such a strong pull on me as a teenage reader. Partly inspired by Rod Liddle‘s recent praise for 1968’s Couples, I’m hunkering down with it now for real, and very much enjoying it—I’d forgotten that Updike had (has?) an experimental streak as a counterweight to those foursquare, WASP-y people and plots, and the stream-of-consciousness passages in Couples get deep into the way his main character, Piet Hanema, wrestles with the abstracted mess of morality and need that’s attached to his infidelity.

All of which is to say that, despite all the chatter about his declining talents, it’s a little sad to see Updike himself somewhat copping to them. In an interview with the McClatchy Papers, he discusses writing at age 76, which for him means stubborn persistence in the face of a few new infirmities:

I notice some signs of mental deterioration. My memory isn’t as good; I can’t think of words. I might forget what one character’s eyes are. Maybe each novel might be the last — but no, I’m not quite ready yet. There’s still the illusion that I’m still learning this curious trade, for whichwhere’s very little coherent instruction. I never once believed in writing schools; this is very much an amateurish endeavor, so that the chance of growing in it is still there for a 76-year-old.

About a week back John Updike spoke in Sacramento, Calif., to promote his new novel, The Widows of Eastwick. The Daily Hornet of California State University-Sacramento covered the event, giving it the headline, “Updike slams modern American fiction”:

Updike told the crowd that he finds modern American fiction boring. He said that current writers are not producing books that challenge readers.

“I think there aren’t these books that are deeply meaningful and life-transforming,” Updike said.

Updike explained that there were many factors affecting the lack of out-of-the-box fiction in mainstream publication.

“People don’t read expecting to find this kind of experience anymore,” Updike said. “It just isn’t there. It is a questing time for a reader.”

He said it could be “writers who are failing to write truly transforming or eye-opening material,” but he laid part of the blame on readers.

“As a whole, we are losing the ability to respond to the kind of work in the way that certainly my parents and I did,” Updike said. “I rarely read a book that gets me excited anymore. I used to read lots of them that got me very excited.”

Updike was apparently full of complaints that evening. According to FlatmanCrooked senior editor Kaelan Smith, he also noted the death of the market for short stories. It’s hard to respond to broad-brush statements like these, but I wonder if there’s any point in holding a book-averse media accountable for the problem. I ask only because the city’s major daily, the Sacramento Bee plugged Updike’s appearance as well as one by “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade. The story ends: “An interview with Kinkade will be published in the Bee Monday in the Living Here section.” No interview with Updike. Priorities, priorities….

The promotional patter for Rod Liddle‘s Little’s essay in the London Times suggests he’ll argue that John Updike made a lot of good authors write badly about sex. But Liddle Little mainly wants to send a mash note to Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples, which he argues was among the first post-war novels that helped make writing about sex seem like a serious literary pursuit. (And perhaps, made contemporary literature seem like a worthwhile pursuit; I wasn’t exactly reading the Rabbit novels for the naughty bits when I was a freshman in high school, but I certainly came away from them feeling more clued in about the private lives of grown-ups.)

Liddle Little may have a point about Updike being among the first to legitimize highly sexualized fiction for American mass audiences, though 1968 was a complicated year in general, and was also the year that Gore Vidal‘s Myra Breckinridge was published; prior to Couples, other novels about sex that got mass audiences were either dismissed as trashy (Peyton Place) or reached shelves thanks only to a great heaving of legal machinery (Tropic of Cancer). It would be years before Fear of Flying or Portnoy’s Complaint or Behind the Green Door or whatever 70s touchstone of your choosing made talking about sex in public less shameful.

Liddle Little soberly makes his case for bad sex in literature—and for Updike’s recent failures—but also inserts a provocative statement that’ll force me to pick up Couples and give it a better read than I did at 14:

Couples, though, has it all. It is Updike’s most experimental — with long passages of stream of consciousness, replete with rich, maybe at times too rich, imagery — yet also his most disciplined. The story is of serial infidelity among 10 fairly young, fairly well-to-do couples living in the fictional Massachusetts town of Tarbox, and particularly the calamitous affair between the two protagonists, Piet Hanema and Foxy Whitman. Their milieu — affluent, comfortable, companionable, surreptitiously adulterous — is as beguiling and attractive as it is corrupt. I still cannot think of a better novel from the past 50 or 60 years, unfashionable though it might be to say as much.

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The D.C.-Area Readings page is updated. Some events for the coming week worth your notice if you’re nearby: Mike Sager, reading from his new collection of Esquire pieces, Wounded Warriors; John Adams, whose memoir, Hallelujah Junction, I’m currently reading; and a screening of Paperback Dreams, a documentary about troubled bookstores, screening at Vertigo Books, a troubled bookstore.

Emily Nussbaum doesn’t feel especially compelled to be reverent toward John Updike in her interview with him for New York magazine, which is a nice and unusual thing. Like a lot of critics, she’s not impressed with his sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the new The Widows of Eastwick, and the interview centers on some of his own personal flaws, from aging to divorce to his perception of women. Part of the fun is that Updike is game for all this, and Nussbaum that gets her jabs in subtly. I tend to get impatient with irrelevant descriptions of somebody’s looks (“she said, tugging the sleeves of her robin’s-egg-blue cashmere sweater”; “he said, removing his horn-rimmed glasses, pondering them owlishly, then putting them back on”). But this bit, where he recalls writing Witches, works beautifully:

“The era in which I wrote it was full of feminism and talk about how women should be in charge of the world,” recalls Updike, waggling the antennae of his eyebrows. “There would be no war. There would be nothing unpleasant, in fact, if women were in charge of the world. So I tried to write this book about women who, in achieving freedom of a sort, acquired power, the power that witches would have if there were witches. And they use it to kill another witch. So they behave no better with their power than men do. That was my chauvinistic thought.”

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Housekeeping Note: This blog’s traffic data tell me that a substantial proportion of readers are in the D.C. area, so I’ve gone ahead and added a page of upcoming D.C. author readings and appearances, which at the moment lists events through next spring. This is all hand-built, so there are likely a few things wrong or missing; if you have any suggestions, updates, or corrections, please drop me a line.

Last night I attended a lecture at Washington, D.C.’s Warner Theatre by John Updike, who spoke on “The Clarity of Things: What Is American About American Art?” It was an interesting speech and a nice opportunity to revisit some Winslow Homer and Charles Sheeler pieces I admire, though it wasn’t without its issues—more on that later today at Washington City Paper‘s staff blog. (Update: That post is now up.) The lecture was part of an annual series run by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the latest issue of its magazine, Humanities, is largely dedicated to Updike. The hard copy of the magazine includes excerpts of his writing on art; online, there’s an interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, and an appreciation by Adam Gopnik. I haven’t kept up closely with Updike’s recent work—In the Beauty of the Lilies made me feel like he had a weakened perspective on modern American life, Terrorist only bolstered that notion, and I’ve tried to avoid the rest lest I get more dispirited. But Gopnik gets at the talents that made Updike great—chiefly an ability to be so knowledgeable yet preserve a certain wide-eyed youthfulness. Gopnik writes:

Certainly, a note of almost religious happiness rises from his art writing. However much it may be frowned on by the pros for being insufficiently “serious” or “critical,” i.e., contextual or historical, it has always seemed to this ex-pro truthful in its unashamed enthusiasms, the desire to match the artist evocation for evocation, representational trick for trick. (In the decade when I wrote about art for the New Yorker, supplying context and history up the reader’s wazoo and beyond, Updike would emerge a couple of weeks later in the New York Review of Books with a few diffident and amateurish-seeming pages which always seemed, frustratingly, closer to the true mark, more infused with the artist’s own ambitions and resonating with the real feel of the thing.)