To John

1932-2009 

I’d just left my final class and was on my way to check my emails when the main page on my computer informed me:     

“AUTHOR, CRITIC JOHN UPDIKE DEAD AT 76” 

The New Yorker went into a state of mourning like I’d never seen before. Tributes from other esteemed writers were splashed over the front page, pouring in, one after the other within minutes of the news breaking. The New York Times presented a slide-show of Updike’s photographs—ranging from one of his first book cover portraits in the 1960s to a photograph taken a year ago. Of course, the most moving tributes of all came from a local paper, The Reading Eagle, where Updike worked one summer as a copy boy.    

I’ve had Updike’s words loom over my own life ever since I read his collection, The Afterlife (1993). I first discovered Updike through an accident at a bookstore. I picked up an audio-book of his short stories called The Afterlife (as read by the author). Ever since, I have kept Updike’s own wispy, slightly muddled and raspy voice in the back of my mind. He had an accent which sounded as though it could only be traced to a general area (“New England” or “Somewhere up North”). Imagine, if you will, how it sounded to a thirteen-year-old on a walk through the development where he lived, to hear this warm voice recite the opening sentences of the title story: 

“The Billingses, so settled in their ways, found in their fifties that their friends were doing sudden, surprising things. Mitch Lothrop, whom Carter and Jane had always rather poked fun at as stuffy, ran off with a young Jamaican physical therapist, and Augustina who had seemed such a mouse all those years—obsessed with her garden and her children’s educations—took it rather raucously in stride, buying herself a new wardrobe of broad-shouldered dresses, putting on a prodigiously expensive new slate roof on the Weston house, and having in as a new companion, another woman, a frilly little blue-eyed person who worked in Boston as a psychologist for the Department of Social Services.” 

It’s typical Updike, isn’t it? In the first two sentences of the story there is change, lust, small-town scandal, politics, money and breaks away from stereotypes. And all in the first two sentences. This is the core of Updike, the tone of the small-town gossip. It is little wonder why, in a 1993 pastel sketch, The Laureates of the Lewd, the artist Edward Sorel depicted Updike and his “challengers” Philip Roth and Gore Vidal as satyrs. Roth looks on with all seriousness, Vidal smiles an evil smirk that would frighten even Richard Nixon, and Updike gives the wide smile that he is famous for, looking almost like a teenaged boy with the I know something you don’t know attitude.    

It is interesting that his final novel, The Widows of Eastwick, is centered on death. Yes, all of the usual Updike-ian twists are there, but death and destruction and the idea that all things must come to an end were particularly hammered in by reviewers. In his review for the New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus points out that, “The witches, having fled Eastwick and dispersed for second marriages, more or less satisfying, have lately lost their husbands.”    

In fact, one does not get more than five pages into Widows before death is dragged up. In this passage, the narrator speaks of the decline of Alexandra’s husband:    

“There had been a challenging nicety in the way Jim dressed himself—pointy vanilla-colored boots, butt-hugging jeans with rivet-bordered pockets and crisp checked shirts double-buttoned at the cuff. Once a dandy of his type, he began to wear the same shirt two and even three days in a row. His jaw showed shadows of white whisker underneath, from careless shaving or troubled eyesight. When the ominous blood counts began to arrive from the hospital, and the shadows in the X-rays were visible to even her untrained eyes, he greeted the news with stoic lassitude; Alexandra had to fight to get him out of his crusty work clothes into something decent. They had joined the legion of elderly couples who fill hospital waiting rooms…” 

*    *    * 

Updike’s themes were always one of struggles—class struggles, life versus death and lust versus Christian modesty, progress versus old values. And Updike’s themes broke through in everything he wrote, whether in short stories or novels.    

The key introduction to John Updike, or so I believe, is the 1979 collection, Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. In this small and vastly underrated collection, Updike tells of the creation and destruction of a marriage. My personal favorite, Your Lover Just Called, was adapted into a short play by the author himself (which is available in the collection More Matter, I believe.) In this story, the phone rings at the Maples house; when Richard picks up the phone the caller hangs up. I believe this story is the paramount of Updike’s recurring theme of suburban unhappiness and infidelity: 

“Richard went into the bedroom, where Joan was making the bed, and said, ‘Your lover just called.’         

‘What did he say?’    

‘Nothing. He hung up. He was amazed to find me home.”         

‘Maybe it was your lover.’    

He knew, through the phlegm clouding his head, that there was something wrong with this, and found it. ‘If it was my lover,’ he said, ‘why would she hang up, since I answered?’    

Joan shook the sheet so it made a clapping noise. ‘Maybe she doesn’t love you anymore.’”    

*    *    * 

When I was little, I would go to the Bethlehem Area Public Library and sit in the adult nonfiction section. I would just sit there and look at the volumes of prose in front of me, among them Updike’s many collections of essays and reviews. Odd Jobs was the first essay collection of his I picked up. Upon reading it, I wanted to be John Updike. I wanted to know everything you could know about literature, to have a firm hand on the critical rudder. And to be so wide-ranging! If only I had the time to keep going like he did, to read everything.    

I will admit that, later that night, I took out the book and went over to my small Remington portable typewriter. I typed out the sections of Odd Jobs and hoped that, one day, I would be able to fill up as many pages as Updike did and to do it as well as he did.