John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009)
In an interview reprinted in his Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov was asked whom he thought were the most talented young American writers of the time. Nabokov gave two names: the now-reclusive urophagiac Jerome David "J.D." Salinger, and John Updike. Salinger has published no book of substance since, and has since passed onto that vaulted plane of punchlines and exhausted jokes. Only Updike kept tissue-thin the gap between his gifts and art, penning what are for me the masterpieces Of the Farm, The Centaur, and the jealousy-inducing Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. Not to mention countless flawless works of short fiction. Of all the Grand Old Men of American Letters (Mailer, Vidal, Bellow, Roth), only Saul Bellow was Updike's equal in Style and Life (I mean in the 18th century, capitalis'd sense of the grand Abstraction).
The first thing of Updike's I read was Rabbit, Run, and from its very first sentence I was pierced by beauty. Updike got prose. He is, for me, one of the luminaries of prose, and, at his very best, in exquisite shivers of perception united music and the visual world to the fickle twists of the human heart like few else. Updike was frequently accused of hollow aestheticism by his more narrowly political and programmatic critics, who cited his apparent preoccupation with the landscape of his birth and the sex lives of WASPs. The implication being that white Anglo-Saxon protestants are unworthy subjects of art, that there is some fundamental, supra-ethical imperative when a writer writes to address, say, the doormat-weaving wives/husbands (we cannot any longer allow weaving to be a gendered construct) of Pinochet's victims. For instance.
Deleterious double-standings aside, Updike wrote with an ironic compassion for his characters that found its fullest expression in the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a vividly flawed, twitchy, vital, selfish ex-athlete, an adulterer and car-salesman who posessed no extraordinary talent or intelligence, a runner-out-on of pregnant women, his children, who was, below all, insignificant, and what's more knew it. Updike's achievement was to bestow utter beauty on Rabbit's life despite his cuntishness, and render starkly and without judgement that selfsame cuntishness so completely that it would've given Flaubert a boner.
Updike's oeuvre was not without its doosies: Toward the End of Time was full of florid floral indulgence (flowers, for fuck's sakes, flowers!), and 2006's Terrorist - while admirable for trying to understand a young Muslim terrorist - was, simply, shithouse. But we can't expect an author to get it right every time, especially an author as prolific as John Updike. Joyce Carol Oates is the only living American author with a similar output, and in my opinion is yet to write a word to warrant it.
The best endorsement I can give is the man's prose itself, the way it submerges the world in its crystal fluid and clarifies it, like a jeweled meniscus.
That filthy black crescent of bins behind the elevators, the floor covered with bent nails, his palms black and Chandler the fairy mincing in every hour on the hour telling him to wash his hands so he wouldn't foul the furniture. Lava soap. Its lather was gray. His hands grew yellow calluses from using the crowbar. After 5.30, the dirty day done, they would meet by the doors, chained to keep customers out, a green-glass-paved chamber of silence between the two sets of doors, in the shallow side windows the bodiless mannequin heads in their feathered hats and necklaces of pink pearls eavesdropping on the echoing farewell gossip. Every employee hated Kroll's, yet they left it slow as swimming. Janice and Rabbit would meet in this chamber, with the dim light and green floor like something underwater, and push at the one unchained door, push up into the light, and walk, never admitting they were going there, toward the silver medallions, hand in hand tired walking gently against the current of home-going traffic, and make love with the late daylight coming level in the window.
From Rabbit, Run
He will be missed.
