Updike and the Past Recaptured

The story lived by the late John Updike (1932–2009) is a peculiarly American one. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the nearby suburban community of Shillington, the only son of a respected junior high-school teacher and a mother who would follow her highly talented boy’s example by publishing fiction (as Linda Grace Hoyer) in the New Yorker magazine.

After excelling in high school, John studied English at Harvard, then art (for he had also contributed cartoons to the Harvard Lampoon) at Oxford. He married young, fathered several children, and, after relinquishing dreams of becoming a professional cartoonist or film animator, landed a “dream job” at the New Yorker. Updike was graduated quickly from that magazine’s “Talk of the Town” and filler-piece assignments (news breaks), and he began writing polished, distinctive fiction and poetry. His first novel, volume of stories, and book of poems appeared almost simultaneously as the 1950s were ending.

Updike’s mastery of subject, milieu, and style was recognized immediately, as he turned out realistic fiction (often tinged with fantasy) in odd and surprising sequences. His defiantly original first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), eschewed the conventional young writer’s focus on autobiographical experience, to imagine a future welfare state’s effect on an old people’s home. Lyrical considerations of youthful experience and marriage graced the limpid short stories of Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). And, in the first of several novels that won prestigious literary prizes, The Centaur (1963), he ingeniously used Greek mythology in forging an immensely moving homage to his conscientious overburdened father.

Updike persevered, achieving matchless successes, creating a national epic of sorts in his four “Rabbit” novels (1960–90), whose painful chronicle of the high-school basketball hero Harry Angstrom’s brief triumphs and numerous failures offers a replete fictional history of postwar American suburban life. There was the mixed achievement of his highly sexually inflected best seller Couples (1968), which today seems both more realistic and more prescient than contemporary reviewers acknowledged. And, as if to demonstrate how far afield this adventurous author could cast his net, there was the sly, boisterous erotic comedy of The Witches of Eastwick (1984); the provocative reimaginings of classic literary forerunners (his three novels echoing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; the tale of Tristan and Isolde in Brazil, 1994; and the personal histories of Hamlet’s mother and stepfather in Gertrude and Claudius, 2000); examinations of political chicanery and strife in a fictional African country (The Coup, 1978); America after a global war (Toward the End of Time, 1997); and the threatened world still paralyzed by the catastrophe of 9/11 (Terrorist, 2006).

There were the short stories, immensely assured, poignant, musically seductive, appearing with dependable regularity even as Updike continued to extend his range. Every year brought a new Updike volume from Knopf, and this author stuck with his original publisher throughout his long career.

Updike wrote enthusiastically about not only baseball but golf (in the lively Golf Dreams, 1996). He wrote a great farewell tribute to Ted Williams (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”). There were also those huge collections of his scrupulously professional book reviews and essays, a partial autobiography, two volumes of art criticism, a play, dozens if not hundreds of unpretentious poems far too human and engaging to be filed under “light verse”—and he found time to edit the authoritative anthology Best American Stories of the Century.

Perhaps the most surprising sustained grace note in Updike’s oeuvre is the trilogy depicting the fictional Nobel Prize–winning (!) Jewish-American author Henry Bech, published 1970–98. Bech is a failed womanizer, a mensch, a frequently farcical victim of his own insecurities, who incarnates a possible sidelong glance at Updike’s highly visible contemporaries (Bellow, Malamud, Roth, et al.)—and an amused wink at the annual rumors that Updike himself would soon be receiving a Nobel Prize.

His work continued to impress and sometimes astonish. For this reader the best of Updike’s twenty-eight novels may just be his saga In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). The...