John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday at the age of 76. One of the most prolific writers of the modern era, Updike wrote memorable novels about the American small town, the American middle-class suburb, sex, death and the divine. From time to time he’d write about baseball.
David Foster Wallace once grouped Updike among “the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction.” He was not endearing himself to the legendary author (if it wasn’t apparent enough, Updike was specifically termed the “Champion Literary Phallocrat”). Updike’s recent novel Terrorist may have been his least accomplished work. His most moving creations behind him, perhaps the Phallocrat should have made a full late-life transition to criticism. It’s no matter, for he’s gone now and his canon can be appreciated for the national treasure it is without expression of disappointment in decline or anxiousness for a more humble literary tradition to form on our watch.
Part of understanding Updike is an avoidance of one’s admittedly well-nurtured aversion to the less-than-ennobling aspects of our culture. Brooke Allen called him “the high priest of the sexual revolution”: in Couples and The Witches of Eastwick and the Rabbit series and almost everything written through the 1980’s there were sexual encounters, messy divorces and self-gratification of the highest order. There was full-fledged eroticism at every turn, and Updike struggled with being so unbelievably good at producing it.
Of course, the issue was never a bodice-ripper in emperor’s clothes as much as a generation of writers, who seemingly all hated their own fathers, coming of age at a time when Updike had been bold enough to challenge the moral wasteland of the beatniks. He represented a stern challenge to the 'sexual revolution' he proselytized at the foot of, exposing the depression and self-hatred that plagued a society of disordered passions. His most famous work, Rabbit Run, was written in response to Kerouac’s On the Road. It said, “This is what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”
The critics may have detested Updike’s seemingly absurd lack of personal anguish over the years. After all, he was an artist, though he benefited from never torturing himself over an elusive essence of cool or a transcendent aesthetic of some other kind. He was never manufacturing something in himself. What he was constantly working out in his writing was related to sex and death and the milieus he subjected himself to as he lived, but it was never really about those things. What was most important to him were “the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last.” His work may not have been modest, but he was.
Nobody likes a writer who is comfortable with his life, and his passive Protestantism was irksome in its complacency. To Updike, the world was divine and physically beautiful, and so were all of its subjects. Even the common element was deserving of flowery prose: Harry Angstrom may not deserve the love of the reader, but he earned the devotion of the author because he was situated in and emanated from a world of beauty. Updike put in more effort than most in scraping away the colorlessness as a matter of philosophy.
Updike’s characters were cut out of a distinctly American fabric and shaped by distinctly American habits. As such, he was a distinctly American writer. He was, by most accounts, a kind and generous and pious man. His artistic range was commendable in itself, but his best work was of the domestic sort. Jeet Heer argued that “no one wrote better than John Updike about what it means to be a husband and a father, about the hearth as place of emotional warmth and also a trap, about the family as a cornerstone of life.”
Updike published work until the very end, for better or worse materially, but always for better in the sense that a sincere attempt at conveying the happiness that comes with an assuredness in the good of the world is always welcome. As is the hope that it may one day prevail in our discourses on culture and perpetually exist in the hearts of the appreciative.
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