Retrospective
John Updike, who died Jan. 27 at age 76 of lung cancer, acclaimed as one of the foremost American writers of the last century, was an author of detached exquisiteness, a chronicler of the exhaustive tedium of suburban adultery and one who anguished over and examined the deep waters of religion and faith.
He was demonically good -- all that splendidly precise, seductive description. It was easy to second the blurbs: "Striking, brilliant ... a literary event .. a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style ... It's incredible! ... inspired" and on and on.
The reviews seem as endless as the output -- scores of volumes including
novels, poems, reviews, children's books. Delicate struggles between streams of theological thought, grand symbols, hidden and apparent, and wickedly clever
mythological ribbons wound through his stories. But the hooks that caught you up and drew you in often were the little things.
He wrote in Rabbit, Run:
As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack in the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread pale hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of this coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. "Hey!" he shouts in pride.
In his memoir, Self-Consciousness, the author so achingly pushed to explain himself, from his itchy skin to his pro-Vietnam stand, and he spoke of death.
“And then there are favorite, pet selves -- the faithful little habitue of the Shillington playground, in his shorts and sneakers, getting in line for game after game of roof ball ... the lonely psoriatic explorer of Caribbean islands, again in shorts and sneakers, wandering with his poor baked skin through the jostle of tourists and natives, savoring the tattered, fragrant, sleepy traces of the old West Indies.
... So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. ... Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.”
The mother figure in Of The Farm gave voice to what might have been an a familiar, late-teenage fear in small Pennsylvania towns that were the landscape of his early work: Get out or risk becoming "an Olinger know-nothing, a type of humanity ... that must be seen to be believed you can't believe it, but the people of that town with absolute seriousness consider it the center of the universe. They don't want to go anywhere, they don't want to know anything, they don't want to do anything except sit and admire each other."
Updike's later work, far removed from Pennsylvania, could provoke twinges of universal familiarity. A poignant few lines in Couples, amid all the unashamed bed-swapping of these in-turned pairs, inject a jolt of tenderness about what a partner can mean. "He wanted to touch her, for luck, for safety, as when a child in Farmington after a long hide in the weeds shouts Free! and touches
the home maple."
And he locates the tiny spot of universal melancholy felt when dragging through the final hours of a weekend winding down:
"She was to experience this sadness many times, this chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon, when the couples had exhausted their game, basketball or beachgoing or tennis or touch football, and saw an evening weighing upon them, an evening without a game, an evening spent among flickering lamps and cranky children and leftover food and the nagging half-read newspaper with its weary portents and atrocities, an evening when marriages closed in upon themselves like flowers from which the sun is withdrawn, an evening giving like a smeared window on Monday and the long week when they must perform again their impersonations of working men, of stockbrokers and dentists and engineers, of mothers and housekeepers, of adults who are not the world's guests but its hosts."
He became, in a sense, a teacher of voyeurism and cultural pluralism. For his people, hopping around suburbia from bed to bed, all of it so explicitly recorded and so effortless and detached, were, for all of their outward ordinariness, often from another place than most of us.
In his book, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art, Jesuit Fr. George Hunt, former editor of America magazine, wrote, "[A] novelist imbued with concern for these three great secrets must of necessity concentrate on the one Great Secret that is Sex. The obvious reason is that it is the one secret of which all his readers are aware, and so it becomes the most intelligible vehicle for his further exploration of those other two secrets to which readers are less sensitive."
In a 1992 interview with Dick Cavett, Updike said: "No, I don't think you can have too much sex in a book, since it is very much a part of people's actions, even when they're not doing something sexy. It would be hard for a Martian, I suppose, arriving in New York City, to figure out immediately that sex was on everybody's mind, but if he lived here long enough, certainly it would become clear to him.”
The immense sorrow weighing on Updike's people, a sorrow so necessary to his construct of religious experience, seemed rarely to come from anywhere outside a small town or a small circle of friends. The tick list of concerns that might cause others not only an empathetic sorrow but a reason for acting -- torture, famine, poverty, homelessness, war, human rights abuses -- sound fallow, almost pretend, in the Updike world, where such matters generally intrude only as background noise. His people suffer self-imposed wounds, they are always hurting one another.
His is a world of Northern sensibilities in which ethnicity (there are exceptions) is like an insignificant point on a resume. These are fully acculturated Americans with an ordinariness that only one so deft as Updike would dare explore.
It is a world, too, of religion and faith that a Catholic fed on certainties might find strange -- the individualistic struggles with God and bold questions, the flippant dealings with the Almighty are scandalously delicious, if disconcerting.
"How did the patently vapid and drearily businesslike teachings to which I was lightly exposed succeed in branding me with a cross?" he wrote in a first-person piece in Assorted Prose. "And a brand so specifically Lutheran, so distinctly Nordic; an obdurate insistence that at the core of the core there is a right-angled clash to which, of all verbal combinations we can invent, the Apostles' Creed offers the most adequate correspondence and response."
In the short story "Sunday Teasing," one of his characters, explaining the difference between Catholics and Protestants, says, "The reason why in Catholic countries everybody kisses each other is that it's a huge family -- God is a family of three, the church is a family of millions, even heretics are kind of black sheep of the family, whereas the Protestant lives all by himself, inside of himself. Sola fide. Man should be lonely."
Character Piet, in Couples, was raised in a stern Dutch Reformed church "amid varnished oak and dour stained glass where shepherds were paralyzed in webs of lead."
It can present itself as an alien world with a severe and remote God and Updike's continual turning around of the three great secrets, surveying acres through a microscope.
Tom Roberts is NCR Editor at Large. This retrospective has been taken from an Roberts' article published in NCR in 1996.
