Endowedwith an art student's pictorial imagination, a journalist'ssociological eye and a poet's gift for metaphor, John Updike who diedon Tuesday at 76 was arguably this country's one true all-around manof letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from lightverse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: aliterary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willfulspecialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almostblogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge andexperience into words.
It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the Americanmiddle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that hewill be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Updike gave "themundane its beautiful due," as he once put it, memorializing theeveryday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinarynuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the50's and early 60's of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns,radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the70's and 80's, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns andsexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.
Updike's four keenly observed Rabbit novels ("Rabbit, Run," 1960;"Rabbit Redux," 1971; "Rabbit Is Rich," 1981; and "Rabbit at Rest,"1990) chronicled the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom highschool basketball star turned car salesman, householder and erranthusband and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (fromfeminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled hiscozy nest. Harry, who self-importantly compared his own fall from graceto this country's waning power, his business woes to the nationaldeficit, was both a representative American of his generation and akind of scientific specimen an index to the human species and itspropensity for doubt and narcissism and self immolation.
In fulfilling Stendhal's classic definition of a novel as "a mirrorthat strolls along a highway," reflecting both the "blue of the skies"and "the mud puddles underfoot," the Rabbit novels captured fourdecades of middle-class American life. Updike's stunning and muchunderestimated 1996 epic, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," tackled aneven wider swath of history. In charting the fortunes of an Americanfamily through some 80 years, the author showed how dreams, habits andpredilections are handed down generation to generation, parent tochild, even as he created a kaleidoscopic portrait of this country fromits nervous entry into the 20th century to its stumbling approach tothe millennium.
Producing roughly a book or so a year, Updike tried throughout hiscareer to stretch his imagination. To the novels starring Rabbit perhaps the self Updike might have been had he not become a writer headded a series of books about Bech, another alter ego described as a"recherché but amiable" Jewish novelist afflicted with acute writer'sblock. While Bech boasted a modest oeuvre of seven books and remained asecond-string cult author, his creator was blessed, as he once wrote ofNabokov, with an "ebullient creativity," and his work, too, gave thehappy impression of "a continuous task carried forward variously, of asolid personality, of a plentitude of gifts explored, knowingly."
In other novels, Updike ventured even farther afield. "The Centaur"(1963) infused Joycean myth into its tender portrait of a well-meaningschoolteacher. "The Coup" (1978) conjured up an imaginary Africankingdom called Kush and its imperial leader Colonel Ellelloû. And "TheWitches of Eastwick" (1984) and its sequel, "The Widows of Eastwick"(2008), depicted heroines who were supernatural sorceresses with thepower to conjure and maim. These experiments did not always work. "S."(1988) used Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" as a jumping-off point for acrude attack on feminists. "Seek My Face" (2002) devolved into aham-handed and thoroughly unconvincing improvisation on the life ofJackson Pollock. And "Brazil" (1994), brimming over with undigestedresearch and bad dialogue, stood as an embarrassing effort to translatethe Tristan and Iseult legend to South America.
Indeed Updike's strongest work remained tethered to the small townand suburban worlds he knew firsthand, just as many of his heroesshared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged hehad suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was "a fleckof dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust," or Colonel Ellelloû'slament that "we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten." Their fear ofdeath threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and italso sends them running after God looking for some reassurance thatthere is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with "itssignals and buildings and cars and bricks."
But if their yearnings after salvation pulled them in one direction,Updike's heroes also found themselves tempted by sex and romanticmisalliances in the here and now. Caught on the margins of a changingmorality, unable to forget the old pieties and taboos and yet unable toresist the 60's promise of sex without consequences, these menvacillate between duty and self-fulfillment, a craving for roots and ahungering after freedom. As the author himself once put it, his heroes"oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts ofdomesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essentialidentity is a solitary one to be found in flight and loneliness andeven adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male humanbeing involves."
Although Updike's earliest stories could sound self consciouslywriterly and derivative at their worst, O'Hara without the bite,Cheever without the magic he soon found his own inimitable voice with"Pigeon Feathers" and "Rabbit, Run." Over the years, the stories andnovels tended to track Updike's own life: couples wooed and wed andwent their separate ways, and the hormonal urges of youth slowly becamethe quiescence of middle age.
In a series of overlapping stories about Joan and Richard Maple(collected in "Too Far to Go"), Updike created an indelibletwo-decade-long portrait of a marriage, chronicling how one couplecreated and then dismantled a life together, while tracing the imprintthat time and age left on their relationship. Many of his later storiesand novels seemed preoccupied with mortality and the ravages of time,featuring characters grappling with the looming prospect of their owndemise with a mixture of anger, grace and resignation and looking backupon their youth in an often cloudy rear view mirror.
As for Updike's collections of nonfiction (including "Hugging theShore," "Odd Jobs" and "Due Considerations"), they not only showcasedhis copious gifts as a critic as a celebrant of other artists' workand a sometimes acerbic literary anthropologist but they alsoattested to his compulsion to enclose between the covers of a bookevery snippet of his work. These volumes featured thoughtful musings oncontemporaries like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, and erudite essayson masters like Melville and Hawthorne, but they also included sucheffluvia as picture captions the author wrote for a Playboy spread onMarilyn Monroe and dutiful responses to questions posed by magazines("What is your favorite spot in and around Harvard?").
In one of these collections, Updike summed up his love of hisvocation: "From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of mycraft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and theentire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories andfantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which becomehandsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and adelightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind ofconfetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out ofbookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and adefiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings makethemselves known to one another."
