John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday and with his passing vanishes one of the last of the great American novelists of the past century. And the first person many of us boomers read (let us be honest) to find out about male female relations. There was no more joyful introduction to that world than his superb novel Couples. In this novel he seemed to perfect a wonderfully lyrical sentence that fused insight with crystal clear observation that allowed us to glimpse a more spirtually resplendent world than the one we currently inhabited.
Updike was wonderful observer of humankind--particularly a certain type of New England middle class American--many of whom might be described as self involved boomers. If his themes were a bit too narrow to win him the Nobel prize, his range as a writer was large-from Bech a Book, to Witches of Eastwick to Terrorist. .
But they all seemed terribly minor works next to the Rabbit books for which he will undoubtedly be remembered for.
The novels bring to life a version of what it was like to experience an America that although prosperous and happy on the outside was often anxious, depressed and disatisfied. Rabbit is Rich, possibly the best of the novels and the last in the series describes a less than fulfilling American dream for the former basketball player as a Toyota dealer salesman. Updike's technique in the Rabbit series clearly influenced Richard Ford to create his own Bascombe series of novels (The SportsWriter, Independence Day and Lay of the Land) to take the analysis of American middle age discontent further and deeper. He was also a fine critic--he leaves several volumes of superb criticism that was often too exquisitely written and lacking a central punch or theme.
Jesse Kornbluth recounts an interesting anecdote. As a testament to that early greatness that was so obvious as early as the 1970s Jesse Kornbluth recounts a mistaken call that led the writer John Cheever to write an early obituary of Updike.
"A reporter who called him at four in the morning to tell him --- incorrectly --- that Updike had been killed in a car crash. Later, Cheever wrote in his journal:
As for John, he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye --- I can think of no other way of parting from him, although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating --- to millions of strangers --- his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition."
For a first seismic sense of the magnitude of the loss and the debt felt by the American literary scene--from Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates to Richard Ford---there is no better place to visit than the New Yorker magazine's "Remembering Updike"
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