The Pennsylvanian

I first read John Updike in the fall of 1977, when a college friend, a mechanical engineering major, introduced me to Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux. I’ve held a high opinion of engineers ever since. We were sophomores at a small Presbyterian school in western Pennsylvania in the town where I was raised, but I didn’t yet think of Updike as the great Protestant writer from my home state. I was taken, rather, by something more immediate in his fiction. Here, I thought, was a writer who would talk about anything, from God to sex to tv commercials. His honesty shied neither from our secret lusts nor from our barely articulate spiritual longings, and he married these elusive inner states to an equally masterly depiction of the cities, suburbs, commerce, and popular culture that constitute our peculiarly American clutter. I wanted to be a writer like Updike, I told my journal.

For an earnest college student wondering how to be a “Christian writer,” Updike was the alternative to such oft-cited models as C. S. Lewis, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor—writers with either a gift for myth and fantasy or a Catholic sensibility steeped in symbol and sacrament. John Updike, by contrast, was for literal-minded plodders like me. He wrote about ordinary people taking the world exactly as they found it. This was realism, I thought hazily, and it was everything beautiful, brave, and fine. In Updike I recognized the individual’s baffled search for God, the stubborn clinging to faith, the persistent doubts and carnal thoughts of the average believer. Sin abounded. Epiphanies were few. This was a fictional world I could believe in.

Some ten years and numerous enthusiasms later, I read Updike’s early story “The Happiest I’ve Been.” Written when Updike was in his late twenties, it recounts a long winter night spent with high-school friends before the narrator, a college sophomore, rejoins a new girlfriend, begins a new semester, and experiences the thrilling, slightly scary onset of adulthood. The story ends on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Pittsburgh, a mountainous stretch of highway that I knew well: “Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the 10 a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a wide-spreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life.” I read these words with an uncanny sense of being personally addressed. Not only did they remind me of certain liminal moments in my own recent youth, but I knew the very pavement, hills, and towns he was describing. I felt exhorted by that second-person voice to feel good about my state. It was the first of many such startling recognitions, and the older I grew, the more I discovered that Updike had been there ahead of me—observing, illuminating, and transfiguring my experience. He was indeed, as I felt unusually qualified to perceive, the great Protestant writer from Pennsylvania. Wherever I lived from then on, I knew his voice would fill my ears.

I first heard the charge that Updike had “nothing to say” at an academic cocktail party in Chicago. Unaware that my partner in conversation had uttered a commonplace, and thus revealed her own lack of substance, I was mostly puzzled by her comment. Updike had nothing to say? To me he said everything—surveying life to its last slippery detail, reproducing it in words more expressive than I would have thought possible.

Nevertheless, in those years of graduate school and my first lowly teaching jobs, I gradually lost sight of Updike. His books were strictly for pleasure, and I had little time. He didn’t fit in with my new theoretical interests. The people I knew and admired didn’t talk about him. He was entertaining, but his...