Big Fat Story
Updike’s wandering eye almost always made its way into the bedroom, and his persistent gaze at sex and adultery, topics considered taboo for the 1960s, made him, at times, a controversial figure. The New York Times called the sexual scenes in his early work “distanced and skeptical” but the novelist didn’t fight that tag for long. In 2006, he defended Couples, his most explicit novel detailing the erotic minglings of neighbors: “Our sensory organs, including the brain, are right down there, and if it happens less frequently in couples as the relationship ages and evolves, it's because it's an act of worship, really. You are worshipping the other person's genitals. That may be a kind of ardor that cannot be sustained forever.” He continued, “I think nature designed sex to make babies and it isn't as interested in the aftermath of baby creation. Men, especially, wander off and try to reconstruct the joy of new sexual acquaintance. Women, too, admit they're prone to wonder what it might be like with another man. Or another woman.”
How many modern writers can write with equal intelligence and grace about both classic American art and sports? Over his career, Updike devoted thousands of words to sports—most often, golf and baseball. His essay about Ted Williams (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”) stands a particular classic: "The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories." Williams was a famously surly character—"his basic offense against the fans has been to wish they weren't there." And even so, perhaps the reason Updike admired Williams was he saw in him a kindred spirit, a man as devoted to his craft as he was to his writing: "No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy."
Penning an appreciation for The Daily Beast, Granta American Editor Jonathan Freeman notes: “In a world increasingly bending toward snark, Updike managed to remain curious, solicitous, a gentleman. If you wrote to him, a letter came arrowing back. He was cordial to interviewers, often to the point of embarrassment. He seemed almost immune to the literary urge for payback.” Updike’s curiosity was democratic and carnivorous: “Though most famously associated with The New Yorker, hundreds of publications around the world can claim him as a contributor, from Popular Mechanics to US Airways’ in-flight magazine. … Nothing, it seemed, fell outside of his purview. In addition to his steady stream of short stories, novels and poems, he wrote essays on baseball, the value of a penny, presidents, and train travel. He brought back dispatches from Helsinki and Anguilla, lectured in Brazil and Africa and folded those observations into two surprising novels.” (Photo: Truman Moore, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Remembering John Updike
When John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday, at age 76, he left behind a trunk of novels, stories, articles, reviews, poems. Where to begin celebrating the legacy of a giant, and giant producer, of American literature? Well, Updike was a man of certain obsessions—sex and marriage, notably, but also sports; and death crossed his mind more than once. The Daily Beast celebrates Updike’s life and work with six of the great American writer’s greatest preoccupations.
Long hailed for his literary criticism, Updike devoted six of the largest volumes of his essays to others’ work. Wyatt Mason notes in Harper’s magazine that he published more than a million words on books in all. Thumbing through Updike’s review copies with marginalia shows the man was a “picture of thoughtfulness” and “unfailingly an artist of the visible, an adherent to William Carlos Williams’s injunction, ‘no ideas but in things.’” In his second collection of essays, Picked-Up Pieces, Updike laid bare his own modest rules for reviewing: “Try to understand what the author wishes to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” Hundreds of reviews were published in The New Yorker over the years, and editor David Remnick said in a statement, “No writer was more important to the soul of The New Yorker than John.” The prolific author most recently published, in 2007, an exhaustive 700-page tome Due Considerations, a compendium of his perspectives on his contemporaries, including Margaret Atwood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Previous volumes of criticism included Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, and the irreverently titled More Matter. (Photo: Alfred A. Knopf Inc./Reuters)
David Foster Wallace on Updike's solipsism.
For Updike, another preoccupation was…Updike. His memoir Self Consciousness dwelled on, among other things, his psoriasis. But perhaps the final word on Updike’s self-examination was the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace’s 1997 review of Toward the End of Time. It stands as a harsh and intelligent assessment. According to Wallace, "no US novelist has mapped the solipsist's terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the ‘60s and ‘70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." The great theme of Updike's literature is "himself," and, more specifically, "the apocalyptic prospect of his own death … When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him." The review includes Wallace's quasi-famous tallying of Updike's themes in this supposedly science-fiction novel: "Total number of pages about the Sino-American war-causes, duration, casualties: 0.75 … Total number of pages about flora around Turnbull's home, plus fauna, weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons: 86." And Updike wasn’t the only one obsessed with Updike—Nicholson Baker professed his love for the master in U and I. (Photo: Susan Wood/Getty Images)
Did readers fall out of love this everyman of letters?
Writing for The Daily Beast, Daphne Merkin observes that, despite Updike’s best efforts to “underline the way in which he takes in the chaos and clatter of the world with an attentive and unfailingly courteous vision,” by some time around 1990, “somewhere between the marginalization of suburban angst and the dawn of multiculturalism—the fizz had gone out of Updike’s name. The news he was bringing was no longer cutting-edge but seemed steeped in nostalgia for lost cultural signposts. … In the end, John Updike probably shone most brightly as a miniaturist—as a writer of stories and essays, where his supremely conscious, sibylline prose had the chance to chew more than it bit off and thus feature him at his mimetic best.”
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