John Updike: The sultan of suburbia
By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.
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