Tuesday, January 27, 2009

John Updike - R. I. P.


From the Washington Post:

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.


Norman Mailer didn't like his writing.

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

I'd say Updike did pretty well for himself with his "readers who knew nothing about writing".

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached." Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's "chuckling whir" or look to the stars and observe that "the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass."
....

"I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'"


I'm with Updike.

He received his greatest acclaim for the "Rabbit" series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.

H/T to the Episcopal Cafè.

17 comments:

  1. R.I.P. Mr Updike.

    I have to admit I didn't much care for "Rabbit, Run" or it's main character. Angstrom struck me not so much as an innocent but someone who refused to grow out of his emotional adolescence.

    But then that would also describe Mr. Mailer

    Peace
    JP

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  2. JP, I wasn't crazy about the Rabbit books, but they held a kind of fascination for me, perhaps because of his life-long adolescent behavior.

    My thought about Mailer, too. An unrecommendation from him doesn't count for much with me.

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  3. I must confess to my almost complete ignorance of 20th century literature...

    To the point of having pains with Tony Morrisson's Playing in the dark. Whiteness and the literary imagination, which I liked a lot, because I didn't know when a carachter was for real (well, Hemingway...) and when it was literary ;=)

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  4. At least Updike never stabbed any of his wives.

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  5. I must confess that the works of John Updike passed me by, and so cannot pass judgment or comment on things that I haven't read.

    Fred's comment need not be harshly received . The multiple assassination of wives did give rise to Anglicanism!

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  6. Fred, that's right.

    Göran, ask me what I know about Swedish fiction. On second thought, don't ask.

    T, I believe that's one of the most positive comments I've ever seen from Fred.

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  7. Am I thinking of someone else, or was John Updike "family"? [i.e., not completely straight]

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  8. Given the amount of time I work with REAL adolescents I find I have little patience for adults who behave like that. The kids have an excuse, lol!

    JP

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  9. met him in 98. I shook his hand, and said what an honor it was. And then, as I was trying to think of something intelligent to ask him, he was pulled over to talk to someone else and the chance was missed.

    Perhaps I should have said, "So, you're the guy who wrote Watership Down." LOL

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  10. JP, exactly.

    Dennis, think what a revelation it would have been to him, had you made that brilliant comment.

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  11. or I could have tried, "I hear that you work with rabbits. We got a problem with them critters in our yard. Any suggestions?"

    It was probably best that I didn't have time to think of something!

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  12. He isn't a favorite writer, but I have read a number of his books. RIP.

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  13. Dennis! Stop now! It all worked out for the best.

    He was a better short story writer than a novelist, IMHO. His writings in the "Talk of the Town" in the New Yorker were quite good, too. I knew his writings mainly from the magazine.

    Selma Lagerlöf, Grand´mère?

    Göran, sadly no. In my favor, I've seen almost all of Ingmar Bergman's movies.

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  14. (After a trip to Google)

    I was confusing him w/ John Cheever!

    [Haven't read either of 'em]

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  15. JCF, yes. I saw it on "Seinfeld", so it must be true.

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