It seems oddly innocent now, especially in its depiction of a middle-class world whose inhabitants have so little to do of real importance that they are almost forced into the emotional dramas of "open marriage". The writing here is richer than in the Rabbit novels, but equally acute:
'I love you' was pulled from him like a tooth. The mirror above the basin threw him back at himself. His flat taut face looked flushed...
Updike's own marriage had ended in 1974 (he married again three years later, to Martha Bernhard, a former member of the Updikes' social circle) and his work in the 1970s revolves unsurprisingly around marital life and marital discord. Adultery featured again in Marry Me (1976), the story of two couples' relationship, set in 1962 American suburbia. A Month of Sundays (1975) is more complex: it has a clergyman for a hero, a glib philanderer sufficiently schooled in contemporary theology to rationalise his most untheological ministering to female members of his congregation.
Throughout his career, Updike wrote short stories, many of them for The New Yorker and classic examples of the magazine's fiction – elegantly drawn portraits of middle-class life, focused on marital tensions, elliptical rather than dramatic. They are beautifully executed, but lack the alternating exuberance and despair of the master of the genre, John Cheever, or even the narrative momentum of an underrated writer, John O'Hara.
An extraordinary exception is the story "A&P". Much anthologised, it is told from the viewpoint of a young man working in a supermarket. Prospect-less, he is, like Rabbit, an example of Updike's vision of what he might have been had he not left his own small-town roots. Three girls enter the shop fresh from the beach, wearing bathing suits, suggesting a mix of sexuality and affluence entirely absent from the store clerk's dreary life. When the shop owner chastises the girls for being improperly dressed, the young man impulsively quits – in a gesture of defiance we see at once is based as much on despair as pique. As he leaves and goes outside:
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course... and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me thereafter.
In Rabbit is Rich (1981), as the title suggests, Rabbit has been sucked into the rampant affluence of post-war America's middle class. He is the owner now of a Toyota franchise, an indication in the oil embargo years of the late 1970s that America can no longer stand aloof from the world. The book's main concerns, however, remain essentially domestic, and Rabbit's persisting feckless sexuality threatens to destroy his already-difficult relationship with his son. The material security afforded Angstrom for the first time cannot disguise his continuing spiritual malaise which, as in Rabbit Redux, seems emblematic of the unease and uncertainty now afflicting the nation.
In Roger's Version (1986) Updike was writing at his finest, this time about a mildly malevolent hero, a middle-aged professor of divinity at Harvard, whose sexual preoccupation is made worse by his knowledge that his sexual abilities are waning. He becomes besotted by the louche, foul-mouthed half-niece who appears on the scene, and is convinced his own wife is dallying with an evangelical computer nerd. It is in many ways an unattractive story, suggesting that Updike himse lf saw the demeaning aspects to Roger's obsessiveness, but his descriptive powers remain extraordinary:
I changed her diaper; her skin was delicious to touch, fine-grained and blemishless, like silk without the worminess.
Or describing how a house was built in the early 20th century:
... the working classes and the work ethic were still hand in hand and skilled labor was cheap, as shown by a quiet outpouring of refined details.
The relentless realism of the Rabbit novels was counterpoised by other efforts more obviously imagined – in The Coup (1978) an ex-dictator tells the story of his rise and fall in the imagined African state of Kush. It is a tour de force, since Updike, like Saul Bellow with Henderson the Rain King, had never set foot on the African continent. Fifteen years later, in Brazil (1994), he again tackled an utterly alien culture in his tale of two lovers who live out a modern version of Tristan and Iseult.
Updike also refused to be confined to contemporary settings, and his interest in the American past inspired his play Buchanan Dying (1974) about the last days of one of the country's more obscure presidents, caught in the middle of the increasing conflict between North and South in the pre-Civil War years. Updike returned to Buchanan in his later novel, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), about an American historian involved in the short-lived Ford presidency after Watergate. And in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Updike traces the century-long impact on his descendants when a Presbyterian minister loses his faith one afternoon. Other novels, including Toward the End of Time (1997), were set in the future, and had a small but discernible sci-fi aspect.
This diversity seemed wilful and reflected the extraordinary gifts of a writer who could put his hand to pretty much anything – he even published five children's books early in his career. Yet Updike's most successful work was reiterative. He repeated the success of his satirical take on Jewish-American novelists, Bech (1970), with Bech is Back (1982) and Bech at Bay (1998). Less light-heartedly, he concluded his Rabbit novels magnificently with Rabbit at Rest (1990). Retiring early, Harry Angstrom now spends most of his time at his condo in Florida, playing golf, alarmed at his testosterone's decline and struggling to make sense of his past. His suspicion that he once fathered a child by his long-ago lover, Ruth Leonard, is confirmed. When he dies, playing "hoops" with a baffled bunch of black teenagers, he is only 56, but seems appropriately played out after Updike's penetrating dissections of his character each decade.
Despite his abiding interest in the state of everyday life in his own country, Updike was neither sophisticated nor very cogent in the limited exposure he gave his own political convictions. But then he never claimed to be. During the Vietnam War he penned the dissenting article "On Not Being A Dove", which briefly threatened to tar him with a reactionary label. What saved Updike from notoriety among his liberal-minded peers, however, was his own obvious uncertainty about his politics, his high standing in all other respects among an East Coast liberal elite (exemplified by The New Yorker), and his essential personal niceness.
What the article reflected, more than anything, was his own optimism about his native country and his belief that however misguided its conduct, the motivation at work was inherently benign. As he said with almost Boy Scout buoyancy, "... I still believe inthe American Dream... in America you have the sense... it's a country without a government we need to be afraid of." In the controversial Terrorist (2006) he portrays, not altogether successfully, a Muslim-American protagonist, Ahmad, who turns against his country, a perspective which Updike obviously finds difficult to imagine fully, just as he seems uncomfortable with violent ambitions. As he admitted in an interview:
Having avoided violence in my life, I tend to avoid it in my fiction. Which is wrong, since violence is part of life. Yes, maybe it's a key part of life... I'm a man of domestic adventures almost exclusively.
Over the years Updike became in many senses an Establishment figure, and won virtually every prize of note in the States. The Nobel Prize eluded him, whether through the caprice of one Stockholm judge, as was rumoured, or a sense of diminishing returns in the later work. He was not always popular with his peers: John Cheever, whom he liked and admired, did not return the affection, though his disdain was less for Updike's work than, perhaps, a sense that Updike lived in a trouble-free zone which Cheever did not inhabit. Bellow, too, resented Updike, perhaps understandably since at least part of the composite caricature of the Jewish-American novelist-hero of Bech was based on him. There was also some sense that he was too overtly careerist. He saw writing as a trade, and admitted that he had never kept a journal because he wouldn't be paid for it.
A frequent reviewer, Updike's criticism was generous, wide-ranging, but not always incisive, since any edge to it was watered down by the gentleness of the man. One exception was the novelist Tom Wolfe, whose dreary novel A Man in Full was the object of a rare Updike debunking, self-confessedly settling scores for Wolfe's devastating satire of Updike's sainted William Shawn, written 30 years before for the Herald Tribune. Updike claimed he disliked reviewing his American contemporaries since this was territory "where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report." He made exception for younger writers such as Anne Tyler, whose praises he sang long before she was famous; he also praised an unlikely mentor, Henry Green, whose work he claimed, surprisingly, as a seminal influence.
He wrote frequently enough about golf to publish a collection (Golf Dreams, 1996) but though entertaining, his pieces were handicapped by his own manifest mediocrity at the game. He seemed intent on finding something in golf that isn't there; the best golf writing either accepts that golf is life or that golf is just a game, but never that golf is somehow a metaphor, made vivid by elevated prose.
As a poet, Updike's work had the recognisable technical merits of rhyming and scanning, and pleased the kind of reader who finds all poetry post-Walter de la Mare incomprehensible. It stands in relation to his prose much as the poems of Kingsley Amis do to his and is roughly of the same calibre – worthy, capable of being enjoyed (especially Telephone Poles, 1963), but entirely unexceptional.
His greatness, then, did not stem from the undoubted multiplicity of his talents, or from the amazing amount he wrote. It lies instead in the best of his novels, where he married his ever-astonishingly accomplished style to characters and situations that reach our hearts. Of course, even in fiction, it seems there can be too much of a good thing, and the sheer volume of books he wrote eventually set in motion a critical backlash, especially among the young. A certain fatigue had set in, particularly noticeable in his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008). The voice, the epitome of an educated New Yorker-reading postwar man, seemed less enlightened in the world of a new century. The late David Foster Wallace went so far as to describe a later Updikean protagonist, and by implication Updike himself, as "an asshole".
Updike's personal opinions were too marked by an intense desire to learn and do the right thing to merit this kind of derision. The aspects of his characters that seem outmoded and reactionary today, in particular the simple lusts of men living in a pre-feminist age, are incontestably reflective of the times they depict. In this sense Updike presented a mirror to America in an age when all seemed possible, a country not yet uncertain of itself. It was a mirror built of words that showed Americans themselves.
Andrew Rosenheim
John Hoyer Updike, writer: born Reading, Pennsylvania 18 March 1932; married 1953 Mary Pennington (marriage dissolved, two sons, two daughters), 1977 Martha Bernhard; died Beverly Farms, Massachusetts 27 January 2009.