On John Updike
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The transition from observation to written description was swifter and smoother in Updike than in that of any writer of whom I know. The other extraordinary Updike distinction was the constancy and pressure of his attention. Wherever he went—and he went everywhere—his mind was observing, categorizing, relishing, and putting into words what it saw, felt, heard, smelled, tasted, imagined. Has there ever been anyone who wrote more engagingly, if, at times, excessively about more things? The American way of packaging, the hysteria of ideology, the charms of Doris Day, the look, smell, and feel of genitalia, a mother’s failure as a writer, children’s anger, the breakup of marriage, Emerson’s essays, the cold war, ’89 Toyotas, Ted Williams, zippers, the Masters golf tournament, the cello, hundreds and hundreds of scenes, people, trends, events, objects?
A great writer? Not in some ways. That is, of Updike’s fifty books, there are perhaps only three or four which hold a reader from line one to the finish in [End Page 494] such a way that he is shaken to the point of tears. Offhand the only one I can think of is Rabbit at Rest, and that perhaps demands your having read the three previous Rabbit books and that you inure yourself to the author’s urge to detail what slows and even subverts the narrative.
The short story was an easier gear for this amazing literary intelligence. In perhaps fifty stories Updike’s narrative gift did not run out of emotional fuel. Many of them can be read over and over with the delight one gets only from literary mastery.
Seldom has sheer intelligence been coupled with a great narrative or dramatic gift. Shakespeare is the acme of such fusion; Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce are the closest novelists have gotten to it. Updike’s novels may not have it, but his remarkable literary criticism does. It is as masterly as it is in part because Updike can summarize and even energize other people’s narratives so that he doesn’t merely illustrate the critical points he’s making about their work but adds a narrative dimension to the criticism, a dessert special.
I don’t believe that any country has ever had a writer who brought such depths of understanding, often beautiful and uproarious understanding, to so much. What a national, what an international, resource this man was.
His death, to me unexpected, even shocking, leaves an unfillable void. One counters the despair such a void brings with “How lucky we’ve been to have had Updike writing for more than fifty years.”
Richard Stern had an essay on friendship in the winter issue of this magazine, and a book of his short fiction was recently reviewed in these pages by Bruce Allen.
