John Updike, RIP



The fact that American Master John Updike, heir to Nabokov, won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever-anxiously awaited "Bad Sex in Fiction Awards" will be in retrospect a minor speedbump along a long road that wound from the backroads of Berks County, Pennsylvania making its way through the hairy curves of Harvard Yard to The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. His journey continued through Ipswich, Massachusetts at cruising speed and into the pages of The New Yorker, where his elegant well-crafted prose made all who became immersed in his writing wonder aloud if a house in the suburbs and a well-scrubbed family with an even-number of children was all there is to the American Dream at midcentury. John Updike died today of lung cancer at the age of 76, leaving American letters significantly the lesser at his loss.

John Updike's craftsmanship was nothing less than breathtaking. His training as a painter greatly informed the colorful, lucid prose and almost liquid texture of some of his most memorable books (and erotic sex scenes). Updike was highly accomplished in virtually every form of literary achievement from short story to long-form novel to poetry to art criticism. Profoundly American, though the scope of his understanding of visual art spanned the centuries he never failed to champion this country's geniuses and his contemporaries. His breadth of knowledge, as exhibited in the literally thousands of well-informed essays in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books are almost staggering in scope, taking on everything from the science of a cell to translations of Chinese poetry.

"Black is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look," wrote Updike in Brazil, one of his most ambitious works. We cannot fail to note that John Updike is often criticized -- most notably by Gore Vidal's lacerating wit -- as being something of a chronicler of suburban adultery, limited by the confines of his Protestant American imagination. That's not quite fair. Updike, ever the rabbit, poked his head out from the bunny hole once in a while to try his hand at subjects unfamiliar to his life experience. Aside from Brazil, there was Terrorist, a post-September 11th look at the Fundamentalist Muslim mind. Gertrude and Claudius was a postmodernist retelling of Hamlet, the Shakespearean play that haunted Updike for most of his life and resonated strongly with the almost Kiekegaardian existantialism flavor (Updike was as enamoured of Kierkegaard's Lutheran minimalism as he was of Nabokov sensory maximalism) of some of his literary criticism of theology.

Updike will be best remembered for his Rabbit Angstrom series, his magnum opus, which, in toto, probably represent The Great American Novel, chronicling the life of a suburban Republican Pennsylvania man navigating some of the main themes -- race, the striving after wealth, the sexual revolution, fatherhood, the phantasmagoria of the sixites -- of the bulk of post-war 20th century American culture. He always looked so unabashedly joyous on the book jacket author's photo, living the literary life, like he cannot believe he is writing for The New Yorker -- me, a kid from the Pennsylvania suburbs! that it is hard to imagine that the Rabbit will no longer come out to play with language in the fields of American literature.

RIP, John Updike.