Tuesday, January 27, 2009
John Updike dead at 76
Posted by Kevin Allman on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 7:09 PM
...according to his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. All The New York Times has on it so far is the AP report, but expect copious and florid obits, reminiscences, and stories in days to come.
Updike was about the least-Southern writer of the 20th century, and I completely admit: I never got him, and I tried. (The great Southern essayist Florence King once compared reading Updike to "trying to cut through whale blubber with a pair of embroidery scissors.") Here, for instance, the NYT quotes from his autobiography, Self-Consciousness:
Now I have long since, in deference to my emphysema, given up smoking, even the smoking of little cigars that, after I broke the cigarette habit, used to get me through the stress of composition. Also, I have given up salt and coffee in deference to high blood pressure and alcohol in deference to methotrexate. The big-bellied Lutheran God within me looks on scoffingly. 'Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?' Frederick the Great thundered at his battle-shy soldiers - 'Dogs, would you live forever?' '
R.I.P, Mr. Updike; many people smarter than I thought you were the best, but your work just never clicked for me. Any Updike fans out there want to school me?
Comments (10)
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In his Rabbit books, he built an entire universe of characters who grew old together. I grew up 100 miles away from him, and reading his paragraphs was pure pleasure. But if you read it and it doesn't work for you, not much I can say.
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Steve, I'm going to try the Rabbit series again and see if I appreciate it more. Any other Updike you would recommend? I know so many people who say he's one of their favorite writers, and I want to find out what I'm missing.
I never got it, either. The only one I was ever able to make it through was The Witches of Eastwick, and I found it underwhelming. Florence King's description really cracks me up.
I tackled the Rabbit series over a period of a couple of years. As with all of Updike's stuff, the books were, for the most part, pretty dense. But there was always enough of a good story that I wanted to know what happened next. Think soap opera with 1960's social commentary. The second in the series was the one I recall as being the best read. There were a few other novels of his I read, but would like to point people to his collected essays on art, "Just Looking," where he reviews exhibitions he had seen over the years. Whether you find his musings agreeable or disagreeable, it's worth a buy because of the 193 full-color plates from the shows of Sargent, Degas, Wyeth, Monet, and for me, an introduction to Fairfield Porter, who has become one of my favorite artists since discovering his work via Updike.
Maybe you should just take smaller bites of Updike: http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172264
I liked the first and third books of the Rabbit series and loved S. The Coup is brilliant.
As a Red Sox fan, I always admired Updike's New Yorker essay about Ted Williams, in which he detailed the Hall-of-Famer's final Fenway Park at-bat in a nearly perfect paragraph: "Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted 'We want Ted' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters." The whole thing is online here: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml
You're right, Noah. I forgot about that one. It's a great article, a true sports classic.
