27- ] American Literature
John Updike 1923 – 2009
John
Updike was a novelist, short story writer and poet. He was also a literary and
art critic. He published more than twenty novels, numerous short-story
collections, eight volumes of poetry and many children’s books. He is most
famous for his ‘Rabbit‘ series – novels that chronicle the life of his
protagonist, Harry Angstrom – in which Updike presented his progress over the
course of several decades.
John
Updike, in full John Hoyer Updike, (born March 18, 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania,
U.S.—died January 27, 2009, Danvers, Massachusetts), American writer of novels,
short stories, and poetry, known for his careful craftsmanship and realistic
but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class” life.
Updike
grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and many of his early stories draw on his
youthful experiences there. He graduated from Harvard University in 1954. In
1955 he began an association with The New Yorker magazine, to which he
contributed editorials, poetry, stories, and criticism throughout his prolific
career. His poetry—intellectual, witty pieces on the absurdities of modern
life—was gathered in his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame
Creatures (1958), which was followed by his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair
(1958).
About
this time, Updike devoted himself to writing fiction full-time, and several
works followed. Rabbit, Run (1960), which is considered to be one of his best
novels, concerns a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when
bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility. Three
subsequent novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at
Rest (1990)—the latter two winning Pulitzer Prizes—follow the same character
during later periods of his life. Rabbit Remembered (2001) returns to
characters from those books in the wake of Rabbit’s death. The Centaur (1963)
and Of the Farm (1965) are notable among Updike’s novels set in Pennsylvania.
Much
of Updike’s later fiction is set in New England (in Ipswich, Massachusetts),
where he lived from the 1960s. Updike continued to explore the issues that
confront middle-class America, such as fidelity, religion, and responsibility.
The novels Couples (1968) and Marry Me (1976) expose the evolving sexual
politics of the time in East Coast suburbia. Updike set Memories of the Ford
Administration: A Novel (1992) in the 1970s, infusing the tale of a professor’s
research on President James Buchanan with observations on sexuality. In the
Beauty of the Lilies (1996) draws parallels between religion and popular
obsession with cinema, while Gertrude and Claudius (2000) offers conjectures on
the early relationship between Hamlet’s mother and her brother-in-law. In
response to the cultural shifts that occurred in the United States after the
September 11 attacks, Updike released Terrorist in 2006.
Updike
often expounded upon characters from earlier novels, eliding decades of their
lives only to place them in the middle of new adventures. The Witches of
Eastwick (1984; filmed 1987), about a coven of witches, was followed by The
Widows of Eastwick (2008), which trails the women into old age. Bech: A Book
(1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998) humorously trace the
tribulations of a Jewish writer.
Updike’s
several collections of short stories included The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers
(1962), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), Trust Me (1987), and My
Father’s Tears, and Other Stories (2009), which was published posthumously. A
substantial portion of his short fiction oeuvre was published as the two-volume
John Updike: The Collected Stories (2013). He also wrote nonfiction and
criticism, much of it appearing in The New Yorker. It has been collected in
Assorted Prose (1965), Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), and
Odd Jobs (1991). Essays examining art and its cultural presentation were
featured in Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989), Still Looking: Essays on
American Art (2005), and Always Looking: Essays on Art (2012). Due
Considerations (2007) collects commentary spanning art, sexuality, and
literature.
Updike
also continued to write poetry, usually light verse. Endpoint, and Other Poems,
published posthumously in 2009, collects poetry Updike had written between 2002
and a few weeks before he died; it takes his own death as its primary subject.
Selected Poems (2015) broadly surveys his poetic career. Higher Gossip, a
collection of commentaries, was released in 2011.
Career
as a writer
1950s
Updike
stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing
"Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to
the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill
his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These
works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker.[8] This
early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P");
John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists
Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.
During
this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss
of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl
Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured
prominently in his fiction. Updike remained a believing Christian for the rest
of his life.
1960s–1970s
Later,
Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators,
including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the
fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the
suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in
Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper
published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In
Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The
Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the
National Book Award.
Rabbit,
Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball
star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and
critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him.
Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
1980s–2000s
In
1980, he published another novel featuring Harry Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich,
which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—all three major American literary prizes. The
novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership".
Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much
fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.
After
writing Rabbit Is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a
playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an
attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist
detractors". One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film
and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in
The Western Canon). In 2008 Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a return
to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.
In
1986, he published the unconventional novel Roger's Version, the second volume
of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's
existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a
"near-masterpiece".[30] The novel S. (1989), uncharacteristically
featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter.
Updike
enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples
stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific
Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three
comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech at
Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled as The Complete Henry
Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious
antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran,
reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.
In
1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which won the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long,
the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the
novella Rabbit Remembered in his collection Licks of Love, drawing the Rabbit
saga to a close. His Pulitzers for the last two Rabbit novels make Updike one
of only four writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the others
being William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead.
In
1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus
Rabbit Angstrom; Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as
"a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes
was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference
was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a
good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
After
the publication of Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early
2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was
frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction
of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil
(1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism
of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face
(2002).
In
the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the
Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and
exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most
successful novel of Updike's late career. Some critics have predicted that
posterity may consider the novel a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised
by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation", while
others, though appreciating the English mastery in the book, thought it overly
dense with minute detail and swamped by its scenic depictions and spiritual
malaise. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of
infidelities in New England. His 22nd novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a
fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but
little critical praise.
In
2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short
fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with
over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and
lyrical Bildungsroman ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from
adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce".
It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. This lengthy volume nevertheless
excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same
period.
Updike
worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it
compiled in Collected Poems: 1953–1993, 1993), essays (collected in nine
separate volumes), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir
(Self-Consciousness, 1989).
Updike's
array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book
Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of
Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story
for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected
Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest
humanities honor; Updike's lecture was titled "The Clarity of Things: What
Is American about American Art".
At
the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early
Christianity. Upon his death, The New Yorker published an appreciation by Adam
Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him
"one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer
since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse
of incompleteness that had haunted American writing".
Short
stories
Updike's
career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with
The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite
the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years.
Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to
give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point
of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of
first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New
Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.
The
Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and
flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here
Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect
the role of alcohol in 1970s AmericaThey were the basis for the television
movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.
Updike's
short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf
over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed
edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.
Novels
In
1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his
response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and
hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States
during that time.
Updike's
early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around
1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm.
After
his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity,
adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his
controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown
of social mores. He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not
exhausted, has exhausted me". The most prominent of Updike's novels of
this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional
Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover
of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society". Both the
magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national
concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of
conduct in sexual matters.
The
Coup (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit
he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.
Poetry
Updike
published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The
Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009).
The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much
of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993).
He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry
over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness
of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike
was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby
or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of
"epigrammatical lucidity". His poetry has been praised for its
engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and
precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British
poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and
for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him
one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading
Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another,
deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay
"smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound
effects". John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as
"beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with
"the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against
him".
Themes
All
in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.
—Rabbit
Angstrom.
The
principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as
death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of
"the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once
said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where
ambiguity restlessly rules."
For
example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of
the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom
contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles
while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960).
Critics
have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its
efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and
books—the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples
stories—demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and
language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between
the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs
meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom
himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.
Describing
his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early
Stories: 1953–1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the
mundane its beautiful due". Elsewhere he famously said, "When I
write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of
Kansas." Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike's
aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962):
"Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do
not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but
tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem
to affirm."
Sex
Sex
in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he
described it:
His
contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the
taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike
can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of
women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.
The
critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external
sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather
than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex. In
Champion's interview with Updike on The Bat Segundo Show, Updike replied that
he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in
his prose. Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery,
especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples
(1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and
abandonment of his family".
United
States
Similarly,
Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition
and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike,
"there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as
well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his
fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and
enlightened as it was unapologetic."
The
Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as
"a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling
ordinariness of American life". But as Updike celebrated ordinary America,
he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by
the downward spin of America". Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's
great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the
materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible
religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and
Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was
blessed, and very nearly successful."
Updike's
novels about America almost always contain references to political events of
the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing
how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary
citizens take place against this wider background.
Death
Updike
often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of
reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In
The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no
goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your
life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and
have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious,
metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.
For
Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of
his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and
less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though,
Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his
deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963),
George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer. Death can
also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for
survivors as an absent presence".
Updike
himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed
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.'
Updike
demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the
poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
And
another regrettable thing about death
is
the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...
In
popular culture
Updike
was featured on the cover of Time twice, on April 26, 1968, and again on
October 18, 1982.
Updike
was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker,
titled U and I (1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his
golf partner.
In
2000, Updike appeared as himself in The Simpsons episode "Insane Clown
Poppy" at the Festival of Books.
The
main character portrayed by Eminem in the film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed
"Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom.] The film's
soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run".
Portraits
of Updike drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine appeared several
times in The New York Review of Books.
In
2022, Updike was portrayed by Bryce Pinkham on the TV show Julia.
Literary
criticism and art criticism
Updike
was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the
best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up
Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary
criticism:
1.
Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not
achieving what he did not attempt.
2.
Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose
so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3.
Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only
phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4.
Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5.
If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same
lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure.
Sure it's his and not yours?
To
these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with
maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do
not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by
friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an
enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a
corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author
"in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other
reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak
or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The
communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of
certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve
toward that end.
He
reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some
19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make
his reviews "animated".He also championed young writers, comparing
them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust.
Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms
of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped
jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and
Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bad
reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a
"damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.
Updike
was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and
profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own
terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.
Much
of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he
often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like
that of his literary criticism.
Updike's
2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About
American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th
century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the
expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its
artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found
in the artistic tradition of Europe.
In
Updike's own words:
Two
centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful
clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem
Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No
ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums
and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his
principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in
the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist
intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and
emptiness.
Critical
reputation and style
He
is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.
—Martin
Amis
Updike
is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation.
He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with
an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his
prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of
Updike's work.
Several
scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of
southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described
"Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that
transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania
as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA
Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As
with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is
fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it
is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes
that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like
"Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his
heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly
Pennsylvania boy."Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's
most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."
Critics
emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and
language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics
consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual
depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and
the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for
misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.
Other
critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a
distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of
the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a
writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful
prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and
banality of American life".
Updike's
character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of
novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered
the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry
Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by Book magazine of
the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The
Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been
canonized by Everyman's Library.
After
Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts,
and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the
founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to
"awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of
John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and
encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works". The Society
will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship
in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial
Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.
Eulogizing
Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's
"literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the
Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden
age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half".
McEwan
said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his
monument", and concluded:
Updike
is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the
metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to
wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the
comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of
narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up,
whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon
wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice
permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than
Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than
Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said
of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was
typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's
education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited
by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the
vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure
and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved
pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted,
you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop
them down to what you think is the right size."
Jonathan
Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's
prose, called Rabbit at Rest "one of the very few modern novels in English
... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation
of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between
one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy
and richness."
The
novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote,
"John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a
literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is
and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor,
Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The
noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but
that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and
whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey". In a
review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose
trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his
work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both
praised and criticized Updike's language for having "an essayistic
saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly
above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too
abstract". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the
perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate
deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his
faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:
For
some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological
optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his
impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his
fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its
cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures,
Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless
energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued;
the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance.
Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant,
battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late
in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge
silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely,
better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these
feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself.
Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human
disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a
belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made
clear in a fair season.
In
direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted
that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that
constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty
curlicues". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional
role of the epic writer". According to Karshan, "Updike's writing
picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit
himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and
child."
Disagreeing
with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates
Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:
Updike's
sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith.
Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek an
essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to
"this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards
what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a
fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and
self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life
is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the
stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His
descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But
love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions
and makes them if it cannot find them.
Harold
Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite
beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier
pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays
on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style
and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond
praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will
never touch his pages".
On
The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever
was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the
chance to review Rabbit Is Rich. He replied:
The
reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three
weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is
perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of
the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys
a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost,
of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that
he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would
have described if I could through a review.
The
Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one
of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip
Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of
the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the
world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and
establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody "thought of
Updike as a vital writer".
Adam
Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer
since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse
of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry
James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the
precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite
urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in
him."
The
critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of
Eastwick (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline
is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike
elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed
affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don
DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature,
but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."
Gore
Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to
have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer". He criticizes his
political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of
authority in any form". He concludes that Updike "describes to no
purpose". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal
mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged
political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "Updike's work is more
and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows
ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more
excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."
Robert
B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike "one of
the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".
The
short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American
literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest
writer",[50] reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York
Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his
prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially
complicated revelations directly his story's way".
In
November 2008, the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike
their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates
"crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern
literature".
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