More on Updike....

Updike and the Affirmation of the Ordinary Life

Brook Allen's obituary in the Wall Street Journal provides an interesting account of Updike and Christianity as well as what we might call Updike's affirmation of the (American) ordinary life, shedding light on why many despise the writer.

Way back in 1997, the novelist David Foster Wallace publicly gloated over the senescence and impending demise of John Updike, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth -- "the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction," pre-eminent chroniclers of "probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Panning Updike's latest novel, "Toward the End of Time," Wallace castigated the grand old man as a "Champion Literary Phallocrat" and asked whether this could finally be the end for the magnificent narcissists.

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Yet while always awake to his species' shortcomings, Mr. Updike evinced a spiritual tranquility that has been distinctly unfashionable in intellectual circles over the past century or so: he was probably the most untortured of all our major writers. A church-going Protestant, he had a world picture that featured not only the looming presences of sex and death, which are undoubtedly his major subjects, but the indispensable activities he once summarized as "the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last." He deplored "today's easy knowingness and self-protective irony" while gently mocking "religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing." His most explicitly theological novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996), came as a surprise to those who thought of Mr. Updike solely as the prophet of suburban adultery.

His easy acceptance of Christianity has irked critics who seek a more strenuous, antagonistic religious stance from their great writers. The formidable James Wood has taken issue with his "strange theological serenity": "Surely John Updike is the least tragic of major writers, and of all theological writers, one of the most complacent. . . . For him the world does indeed seem to exist as a divine visual gift, and as a consolation or reassurance, rather than a proof."

True words perhaps, but how much of an artistic limitation does this constitute? It may put him below the level of a Melville or a Milton, but it is what makes him so uniquely Updike, and the ability to communicate the world's "divine visual gift" is not to be sneezed at. Mr. Updike's precise, elastic prose, its joy, its unexpectedly baroque adjectives yoked with the most banal objects and images, turn the ordinary into the extravagantly artful. Only Nabokov, with "Lolita," mined mid-American trashiness for gold with as much success as Mr. Updike did.

The "Rabbit" novels -- "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), followed by the novella "Rabbit Remembered" (2001) -- constitute a consummate literary transfiguration of the commonplace: "The tetralogy to me," Mr. Updike commented, "is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation. He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important." The car-dealership, the Florida condo, the basketball court, the unseemly heaps of junk food that make up Rabbit's banal world are described not with contempt, in the manner of today's hip ironists, but lovingly: They are beautiful because they are part of this infinitely beautiful life.

Updike Reflects on His Death

Today, the New York Times printed the following poem by John Updike, from his forthcoming collection, “Endpoint and Other Poems."

"Requiem"

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.