An American subversive | The Economist

Jan 29th 2009From The Economist print edition
Three themes pervade John Updike’s fiction: God, sex and America
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JOHN UPDIKE, who died on January 27th at the age of 76, published 28 novels, 14 collections of short stories, nine volumes of poetry and half a century’sworth of reviews on, among other things, photography, painting, golf and cartoons. With all his talent as a wordsmith, he was also a gifted cartoonist.A Protestant to his bones, Mr Updike toiled at his typewriter, writing three publishable pages a day, a book a year, working in an office each morningfrom 9am until lunch, convinced that everything around him, however mundane, had a deeper significance.
In this cascade of words, some work was inevitably pedestrian. But at its best, Mr Updike’s writing represented the experience of his own generation ofsilent Americans—men, especially, who grew up in the shadow of the second world war and God-fearing austerity, only to find themselves bemused participantsin the swinging sixties and the decades of consumer excess. Men liked the shiny-eyed way he wrote about sex; women, reading such lines as “She is likingit, being raped” and “As a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed”, often judged him to be a cold-hearted exhibitionist.
It was in 1968, with his fifth novel, “Couples”, that Mr Updike became suddenly famous. Sour at the decade’s changing mood, his thirtysomething heroes consolethemselves with drink and “frugging”. But it is with the four “Rabbit” books, published between 1960 and 1990, that Mr Updike will be most closely associated.His hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a former basketball champion turned secondhand-car dealer, a man grown bored and frustrated, his best years behindhim, who is trapped in a marriage from which only extramarital sex provides any relief. To millions of readers, even to the author, Rabbit was so realthat he might have been Mr Updike himself, had the hawk-nosed novelist not been saved by becoming a famous writer instead. “Rabbit was a ticket to theAmerica all around me,” he wrote in a new introduction when the tetralogy was complete. “He was always there for me.”
Very much a Yankee, Mr Updike was the great white Protestant writer in a literary era that was dominated by Jews: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and PhilipRoth. He liked to say that he was taught to write by Henry Green, the greatest of English Modernists, but added that this somehow implied he had “learned”writing, and “it is not a business one learns—unlearns, rather…with each day new blank paper.”
Mr Updike’s two main themes were God and sex. The third was America. He complained that the problem with writing about his own country was that “the slotbetween fantastic and drab seems too narrow”, and yet Rabbit could have been born of no other earth. Mr Updike brimmed over with middle-American prejudices.He disliked the disorder of the 1960s and 1970s, a subject brilliantly explored in “Rabbit Redux” (seereview)and “Rabbit is Rich”, and he was one of the few American writers to support the Vietnam war.
Champion of the great American loser, Mr Updike used writing, not just for his readers but also for himself, to make sense of the guilt-ridden anxietiesof Protestant middle America, with its residual self-righteousness mixed with the temptation represented by strip malls and motels. He disliked the NewYork literary scene despite writing for the New Yorker and Knopf, a publisher, for his whole life, and was much happier with the small-town Pennsylvaniaof his childhood or suburban New England. If in his private life he made fresh starts, they were always within the narrow confines of the familiar: therewere two wives, (first the daughter of a Unitarian minister and then a psychologist he met socially), two major house moves (to Ipswich, Massachusetts,and then to Beverly Farms, near Boston, where he died) and three churches (the Lutheran he inherited from his parents, then Congregationalist and finallyEpiscopalian).
Through the ages, American literary masterpieces, such as “Moby Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, have been peopled with eccentric, rootlessoutsiders. Mr Updike’s lodestar was Stendhal’s definition of a novel as “a mirror that strolls along the highway”, taking in both the “blue of the skies”and “the mud puddles underfoot”. His triumph lay in taking the puritanism and practicality of the early settlers, such “enigmatic dullness”, he calledit, and making it shine.