John Updike passes, and his work will rot with him, some hacks can only hope

Lee Siegel is a writer and reviewer who offers a handy guide to Updike, and to those who seemed to despise him in a variety of ways. However, even his commentary against these other writers seems to be a bit off. I don't know what to make of it. But I like portions of it enough to put it here. Further consideration will be necessary.

Writing Off Updike - The Daily Beast

No American novelist with Updike’s accomplishments has ever been as dumped on as the author of the “Rabbit” tetralogy and dozens of other books. A few of Updike’s characters—Rabbit; the Maple family; Updike’s unlikely alter ego, sad-sack Jewish writer Henry Bech—have become part of American folklore. Yet he was not just attacked. He was abused.

But people reacted to Updike’s plentiful writings—23 novels, 146 New Yorker stories, more than 500 reviews and poems in The New Yorker, dozens of humor pieces, gem-like art criticism in The New York Review of Books—with something like angry contempt, as if his prodigious publishing on diverse subjects were not the Goethean force of nature that it was, but some kind of Ponzi scheme directed at sucker readers. Last spring, an editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review publicly implored Updike to publish less, surmising that “perhaps there’d be more room at the bigger publishers” for “writers who are doing exciting things.”

Many of the obituaries and tributes of the last week seemed either patronizing or mechanical. “Blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words,” wrote Michiko Kakutani. Lorrie Moore gave Updike a gold star for his “erudition and hard work.” Also for his “enthusiastic witnessing.”

James Wood seems especially prone to dismembering Updike's reputation. As Siegel puts it, I suspect it was for reasons as petty as why some believe that GW Bush was the worst president our country ever had: lack of perspective outside of one's own thought-stifling little world.

From almost the time he started to work at The New Republic in the mid-'90s, Wood began writing about Updike as if making slashing comments on a student’s midterm exam. The two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner wrote prose that suffered from “a professionalized ordinariness.” Updike actually published in airline magazines, Wood mocked. Updike’s language “lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics.” His entire body of work was “not only dated, but provincial and minor.” Wood concluded that “Updike is not, I think, a great writer.” And why was this? “Because Updike is unable to picture a reality more powerful than his own. He is unable to picture the opposite of his own reality.”

So much for the hyper-delicate, exquisite, Proustian sensibility that created Rabbit Angstrom, the former high-school basketball star, kitchen-gadget and car salesman, afflicted so powerfully and convincingly by tragedies and failures that never touched Updike’s starry life. Not to mention Henry Bech, an urban Jewish novelist as “opposite” to Updike as Anna Karenina was to Tolstoy.

Updike refused to be what Norman Mailer and others were: liberally closed-minded, and lacking a realist perspective of current-day life.

Of course, plenty of other reasons exist for the special spleen directed at Updike. There were his middle-class, suburban, frankly Protestant settings, which drove modernist Jewish critics like Ozick and Bloom up a wall—when in 1989 Updike an essay that defended his decision to support the Vietnam War 20 years earlier, in Commentary, which was the by-then neoconservative headquarters of Jewish intellectual modernism, he must have known that he was entering a hitherto locked door.

Then there was Updike’s 1986 speech at the PEN conference that year. As Norman Mailer and others thundered against the oppressive state, Updike slyly celebrated America’s greatness in the form of a modest tale about a reliable postman delivering to Updike uncensored mail. (Was that an unconsciously defiant reference to editorial correspondence, and thus to Updike’s fecundity?) Updike’s 2006 speech at the Book Expo convention in Washington, D.C., in which he predicted the death of the author and the book at the hands of Google and the Internet’s “electronic anthill,” marginalized him even further.

But it was Updike’s Dorian-Gray-like relationship with The New Yorker that finally determined his ludicrously unfair treatment by the cognoscenti. He was not, in people’s stereotype-laden minds, a novelist confronting life’s elements and ordering them out of his own guts, guile, and gift. He was not a sovereignly autonomous Hemingway, or Mailer, or Roth. He was, in the end, a “New Yorker writer.” The fabled magazine both gave Updike his renown and had the effect of explaining it away.

Updike was a writer who I admired, if only for his success and long trail of work. I know that sounds idiotic. I didn't read one of his novels, but his short stories and essays, yes. He essentially escaped my favorites list, but this commentary seemed to misunderstand some elements of others' comments about Updike's work. That in itself fascinates me.


- Jonny O

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