John Updike’s life and work

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Just reading a list of John Updike titles can make a normal person -- one of the billions of non-Updikes who populate the world -- winded: Think what it took to write them. The fiction titles work together like a loose narrative: At first, you enter a festival space ("The Poorhouse Fair;" "Rabbit, Run"), moving past lots of exciting bird and animal imagery at a pretty good clip. Then the strong, solid domestic titles of the middle years ("Couples," "A Month of Sundays"), filled with marriage and comfortable entanglements. Next the suave titles -- a seasoned, been-around voice pouring out the whiskey and telling you where it's at: "Trust Me," "Roger's Version." In recent years, a post-game sigh of an imagination moving gratefully out to pasture, with an occasional snap of irritation: "The Afterlife," "Bech at Bay." Updike is so compulsively a writer that even his "Also by Updike" pages tell an interesting story.

There's a discomfort about Updike. America is still new to its celebrity culture -- we've never decided what to do with our veteran actors, athletes and writers. (Do we go on applauding them? Do we slip them a pension and get them away from our population centers?) When Updike comes up, so does a kind of sub-auditory impatience: He's probably still the best word-by-word, thought-by-thought, sentence-by-sentence writer we have, but isn't it time he moved on?

Salon.com > David Lipsky

John Updike’s life and work