The Masterly Blasphemer (Fine Essay on John Updike)

The Australian ^ | 2/14/2009 | Ian McEwan

[mojito]

A "BIG-BELLIED Lutheran God" within the young Updike looked on in contempt as he struggled to give up cigarettes.

Many years later the older Updike, now giving up on alcohol, coffee and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers -- "Dogs, would you live forever?" But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike's "sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality." In the mornings, he could write "breezily" of what he could not contemplate in the dark without "turning in panic to God". The plain facts of life were "unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalising it -- approaches blasphemy."

And now this masterly blasphemer, whose literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean, is gone, and American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer, is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth. We are coming to the end of the golden age of the American novel in the twentieth century's second half. Henry Bech, Updike's remote Jewish other, never immune to an attack of status anxiety, mused on the teeming hordes of his gifted and despised contemporaries -- "Those that didn't appear, like John Irving and John Fowles, garrulously, Dickensianly reactionary in method seemed like John Hawkes and John Barth, smugly, hermetically experimental. O'Hara, Hersey, Cheever, Updike -- suburbanites all living safe while art's inner city disintegrated. And that was just the Johns."

[mojito]

This is the finest piece on Updike that I've read since his death. The author is novelist Ian McEwan.

[AreaMan]

The best endorsement of Updike is this by Gore Vidal:

Vidal mockingly refers to Updike as "our good child," in reference to his wide establishment acclaim, and excoriates his alleged political conservatism.

If a p.o.s. like Vidal dislikes him, he (Updike) must be good.

[supremedoctrine]

That may be the finest piece on Updike ANYONE will ever write. McEwan is indeed a great writer, also. A page or two early in his novel THE CHILD IN TIME, addressing the visceral dislocation of living with the presence of a dead child, is one of the most stunningly and powerfully crafted pieces of writing by any contemporary I have read. My friends and I devoured Updike’s early books of stories and novels in high school in the early-mid 60s.....a shame I got out of the habit of indulging in the pure pleasures of reading fiction. Glad Updike never stopped indulging in the pure pleasures of writing it.

[B-Chan]

American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer, is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth

Uh, hello? What about Thomas Wolfe? Hello?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Or Pynchon...

[ckilmer]

I think the writing of all the authors in the article including updike is dead. Just stone cold dead.

Of course, I can’t think any novels anymore that are particularly alive.

I read most of mailer’s books when I was younger. I think he said something to me a couple decades ago. When I tried to read Mailer a couple years ago—what I found on the page looked like total gibberish... I’m clueless as to what anyone would see in his writing. And yet people refer to him all the time.

[x]

Updike's earlier stuff is good. The later stuff not so good. The stories are better than Rabbit Run, so far as I can tell.

Reading the later Rabbit novels, I got the feeling Updike wasn't writing about real people he could have known anymore, but just delivering his Nixon or Carter or Bush or Clinton era report to the printer's.

[ckilmer]

of course the instant updike presumes to put words into the mind of God, his writing collapses.