John Updike has died this week.....

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.

"Great Apes" A review by M.Kakutani

'Great Apes:' Life Among Randy Apes Can Be Tough on a Guy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times


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GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.

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Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.

Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.

As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.

Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.

The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.

As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.

"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."

Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.

Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.

All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.

The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").

"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.

Solzhenitsyn the great survivor will live on as truly great writer

The man who exposed Stalin's horrors outlived his time, turning from a prophet into a zealot, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

HAD HE died about 30 years ago, instead of living on until Sunday to die of heart failure at 89, the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers.
But he made one mistake - he survived.


Not only did he survive the second World War, Stalin's death camps and stomach cancer, Solzhenitsyn, the author of more than 20 books, who went into exile, initially to Switzerland, and then on to the US where he remained for 17 years, survived communism.
His was not an exile of glamour. By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont where his household lived in a high security compound of sorts, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Russian dissident, Joseph Brodsky, who was possessed of a swagger, an anger he could use to theatrical effect and a willingness to play to the gallery. Aside from all of that Brodsky was only 55, he favoured highly Americanised English, whereas Solzhenitsyn's was formal. Above all, he repeatedly attacked liberalism. His years in the West saw the one-time prophet become a zealot.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn was very different from Brodsky; he was reclusive, taciturn, an ex-soldier and detached since childhood, his father having died before he was born. It was his fate. His soldier father, having survived the Great War, then died in a hunting accident - some suggested it was suicide.
Whatever the truth, the future writer was born in the shadow of a family tragedy and was left with relatives while his mother went to work in a nearby town. He was also born into revolution; his birth in Rostov on Don in 1918 coincided with a time of global upheaval. For Russia it was cataclysmic. Tsarist Russia died in a bloodbath and Communist Russia was born into another.
The young Sanya was clever and secured a first-class degree in maths and physics while also pursuing his interest in the arts, particularly literature, and he completed a correspondence course. Then he was called up. Already something of an intellectual, he proved an arrogant soldier, serving as a gunner and later an artillery officer. He was twice decorated and was the commander of his battalion. He was soon a captain. But he made a mistake; when writing a letter to a friend, he made "derogatory" comments about Stalin. The irony was cruel. Having served his country well, he was then arrested as an enemy of the people in early 1945. His sentence seemed mild enough - only eight years - but those eight years were spent in the hell of the labour camps, initially in general camps in the Arctic Circle where the political prisoners lived alongside criminals, and later in the harsher conditions of Beria's "special" camps for long-term prisoners.
His experiences in the camps inspired his masterful first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , first published in Novy Mir, a literary journal, in 1962. It was the book that would make his name, and for many, it remains his finest artistic achievement. It is written with a bleak lyricism that is both heartrending and also, at times, deeply witty. It is his most human book. For those who doubt him as an artist they need only read this book and experience life in the camp through the thoughts of Shukhov, who survives the biting cold and the hunger.
He had been released from the camp in 1951 but then had another battle to face, cancer. This experience would later inspire Cancer Ward (1967). With The First Circle , published in 1968, Solzhenitsyn proved that he was privy to the literary power that had dominated the 19th-century Russian novel.
Yet all the while Solzhenitsyn the artist was being pushed aside by Solzhenitsyn the campaigner. He set out to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. He began his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago , a history of the political oppression and personal suffering that destroyed millions. It is a three-volume labour of courage. In 1967 he revised and retyped the entire text which runs to more than 1,500 pages. At that time he did have some support within Russia, also he could draw on the influence of Pasternak's legacy. The international success of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had made him famous. It was a useful shield - he did not disappear, he was merely quietly deported.
There is no disputing his contribution towards the collapse of communism - he exposed the system. He had also demolished the myth of Lenin with his boldly ironic Lenin in Zurich , which was first published in Paris in 1975. By then he had already been honoured with the Nobel Prize, although he had not been able to accept it in person in 1970. His books were being read all over the world and he was grimly devoting himself to the story of Russia. The witness, the writer, had become an historian. The Gulag Archipelago is the defining study of the horrors communism inflicted on Russia. Unfortunately, unfairly for Solzhenitsyn, a shift occurred. He outlived his usefulness. No longer a prophet, he would be dismissed as a polemicist and a crank.
In addition to survival, his love of Russia proved another mistake. After the fall of communism, he decided to return home. By then his country had changed beyond recognition. Most Russians when asked to name great Russian writers rarely included him in the roll of honour. His homecoming in 1994 had none of the expected triumph. Indifference, not affection, met him. His books were dismissed as boring and his Russian was considered ugly and graceless.
The British writer Michael Scammell wrote a detailed and near definitive biography in 1985. It is a good book, even including material on the writer's second marriage during which he first became a father at the late age of 52. Solzhenitsyn, who had never wanted children and effectively broke his first wife's heart because of this edict, eventually had three sons.
If his country lost interest in him as both a writer and a polemicist, the West has continued to take him seriously, although US opinion of him was damaged by his reclusiveness. In 1998, the maverick British writer DM Thomas, who has long held an interest in Russian history and literature and who has also translated many of the Russian poets, attempted an eccentric biography of Solzhenitsyn, focusing on his personal life, his ego and his vanity.
As a schoolgirl I remember reading the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago back to back and wondered at the cruelty of humankind and also the endurance. In an interview with me in 2006, the British novelist Martin Amis attributed Solzhenitsyn with opening his eyes and inspiring his novel, House of Meetings .
Yes, the strange, remote, determined Alexander Solzhenitsyn did outlive his time; the country he tried to save turned its back on him with all the indifference of an ungrateful child. Yet his achievement remains and, for all the truths contained in his non-fiction and autobiographical writing, his fiction, Cancer Ward and The First Circle are compelling, important novels, while One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich remains a masterpiece. The prophet may have been forgotten but the novelist will be remembered.
© 2008 The Irish Times