Published January 27, 2009 | 
John Updike described the world he saw in beautiful prose. Now he has died at 76, and I’m sorry that he won’t be around to chronicle baseball or psoriasis any longer.
However, I will not miss his voice as a fiction writer. With effort I can forgive the youthful pretension that embedded chunks of untransliterated Greek — including the final line — in The Centaur. (I find it impossible to forgive his editor, however.) But throughout his long career, he used his great gifts to shallow ends. Something in him was stalled at the adolescent stage of seeing females as utterly fascinating, utterly alien tabs and slots for his delectation, and sex as the only real pleasure or transcendence in life.
There are other reasons his books fail to move me. Like John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and lesser writers of the same generation, he chronicled the woes of well-off suburban white males. My response to their anomie: If your comfortable life is so wretched, you have the power to give it meaning — go forth and serve the poor, and stop drinking so much.
Moreover, he grew up in my own home state, but his awareness of *place* (and of poor people) was as blunt as his awareness of middle-class people (and their endless hunt for status) was acute. And I grew bored with the over-emphasis on sex. Given my own sexual obsessiveness, that’s saying something.
I could see his great strengths — the preternatural vividness of his observation, the unerring perfection of his metaphors. I wish him well in whatever follows.
Something in him was stalled at the adolescent stage of seeing females as utterly fascinating, utterly alien tabs and slots for his delectation,
Thank you. That’s always how he struck me, and I’m not sure I ever made it thru a Rabbit novel, although I tried several times. I was just starting to cross my eyes at all the loving tributes and then I saw your review. So thanks :)
Ooh, yes, that’s it!
It was sort as if he was devoting a lapidary’s attention and a silversmith’s skills to making a ring from glass and pot-metal coated plastic. I stopped reading him long ago, because he bored me as well.
Neat.
I know he’s a loss for many, and I’m sorry he’s gone. But I threw the first Rabbit book against the wall and never picked up another of his novels. ‘Nuff said.
See, that’s why I’ve been getting morbid lately. So many of the people I have considered my “generation mates,” and very interesting people, (not all admirable, but certainly interesting human beings) have been heading off this mortal plane in the last year or so.
Thank you for this. He was soooo irritating, so I was holding my tongue, but yeah, what you said. Not looking forward to the memorial hoopla amongst the literati and their organs.
Wow. Yes. I agree. Even though I’m generally considered the literati, I couldn’t stand him :)
This is a lovely tribute — and v fitting, I think. I liked his short stories a lot more than his overworked novels (and DEF more than the Rabbit books; has there ever been a more unpleasant psyche to be stuck in?). I love your way with words.
It also strikes me he is I think the last person to have that sort of NYorker-style career — Cheever had one too — I think he says in one of his early nonfic books that he sold a story to the NYorker for something like $200, and if he sold them two stories a month he could support his family, or something, so that was how he worked it out — like an equation. I don’t know if they still have things like first-see contracts or COLA adjustments or if it’s all totally a new regime now. Adam Gopnik (and to al esser degree, Anthony Lane) seem to have slightly similar nonfiction careers, but Updike really _was_ the magazine — or was it vice versa? It published his poems, his short stories, his book reviews, his longer nonfiction pieces….David Remnick and Malcolm Gladwell and other people have a piece in nearly every issue, sure, but the only writer who seems as _synonymous_ with the magazine to me is John McPhee — who quit writing for the magazine for quite a while and, again, didn’t publish short stories or poetry in it.
Meanwhile, the NYorker appears to have locked up most of those online stories and book reviews and poems and squibs and articles and pieces for subscribers. Bad form, NYorker.
New Friend
I saw that you added me to your Friends list — thank you! — so I’ve added you to mine and dropped by here to browse.
I posted a notice about John Updike on my blog “Hypatia’s Hoard of Reviews” and including some links to his writing.
In the play I’m performing right now, the younger character bemoans the fact that she has nothing to draw on but “Wasp culture – which is no culture at all.”
To which I reply, “Tell that to Cheever and Updike.”
I’m pretty sure the playwright agrees with the younger writer.
Yeah, not happy to see him go, but not much use for his novels, either. In fact, the only writer in that whole cohort I can take is Bellow.
I tend to think of Updike as the dissertation writer who you thank God for if you need information on Precisely That: The Hangover Cures of Frogs Prone to Migraine, or the like. If one wanted information on his class, gender, race, and generation, of a very precise nature, you’d find a lot out from reading him. For me it’s a very alien culture, and I’ve never wanted it not to stay that way. But on some level I’m glad he existed and chronicled something I consider for the most part pernicious; at least one will know what it is, or was.
The thing I do thank him, and to a greater extent Cheever, for is in recognizing that he had a culture and belonged to a race, and how specific a lot of this stuff was. Whiteness, especially WASP whiteness, often isn’t considered a culture at all, as women have been emphatically gendered in patriarchal representation and men not. I think Updike did a little to change that, though from a perspective that is altogether too complacent.