Goodbye Mr. Updike

Apart from an (unfortunate) attempt at reading The Centaur I didn't get far with his fiction. But his prose, and especially his essays in the New York Review of Books, struck me as uniformly excellent.

I never quite understood why he got so much sympathetic attention while he was alive, as compared with other white middle class prose technicians (Fowles, Cheever, Burgess). He had pride of place in the establishment publications - the earnestly middle-brow New York Times Book Review couldn't get enough of him. He was a Harvard man (went there on a full scholarship, edited the Lampoon, graduated summa cum laude) and they loved the guy. All the more reason to be skeptical of his big reputation.

Anyway, you never get the whole story until the body is cold. I hadn't known until today that some prominent critics derided him as light, that he'd dumped family #1, the degree to which his Bech character tweaked his Jewish literary rivals (esp. Salinger), or that he had roomed with the (increasingly relevant and Proto-DrXian) Lasch.

And I, superficial snot that I am, took his prolific output as evidence of (at best) diluted genius. Joyce Carol Oates puts me in my place on that score:

Someone said that John Updike publishes books as often as John O'Hara did, but thankfully his books weren't as long as O'Hara's... This is an attitude I can't understand. Any book by Updike is a happy event. The more the better.

She's right. I've read a lot of his work now, always thinking to myself this fellow is not quite at the summit. Yet I've never seen a misplaced or mis-chosen word, a sentence that wasn't handmade and polished, a paragraph that didn't serve the larger aim. He was a restrained and skilled prose stylist, and I was wrong to not respect that.

The LA Times obituary (literary obituaries are like book reviews, they just cover more material and have better insults) offers up Harold Bloom's best shot. Bloom called him "a minor novelist with a major style." It's a zinger, but so what? If you have a major style you are a major novelist. It's like saying Joe Montana was a good quarterback but not a good passer. Noel Coward wasn't great because he wasn't concerned with deep thoughts? Surely it is too much to ask even of a great novelist that they be deft with heft. Of all novelists perhaps only Joyce could fill that particular order. And it is not a black mark on a man's reputation that he wasn't quite as good as James Joyce.

The one thing that will probably stick is that Updike never seemed willing to risk it all. The title of his 1983 book of essays, Hugging the Shore, could well be his artistic motto. It's not as if he wasn't ambitious - rather, I suspect that he correctly saw that excessive ambition was a persistent vice of American literature.

He also seemed to understand that the relationship between a creative artist and critic is unlikely to be fruitful unless it is accompanied by intimate understanding and a certain degree of sympathy on the part of the critic. "It is almost impossible to avoid, in writing a review, the tone of being 'wonderfully right,' " he warned. His own critical work exhibited none of the arrogance you find in critical commentaries (like this one, for example). Pick up an Updike article from any of the last four decades, and you'll find beautifully crafted prose that gently argues but also educates (here's a recent one). Scarce in any time, supplies exhausted at the present hour.

Here's a trivia question - before men of letters became extinct, who was America's greatest man of letters?

Goodbye Mr. Updike, I don't think we'll see your like again.