John Updike - R.I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/27/books/AP-Obit-Updike.html?hp

The guy was a machine, and I didn't much care for those adjective-laden "graceful" sentences in his fiction, but Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs are masterful literary journalism.

waht

Updike

He slipped away while you were studying your torts, Hurting.

damn, I guess I didn't realize he was 76. I've only read the first Rabbit, some short stories and random essays. Good prose-ist. RIP

He slipped away while you were studying your torts, Hurting.

― lemmy tristano (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, January 27, 2009 1:50 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark

2009?! Who's the president!?

A&P

Yeah, A&P is great.

strangely, I don't remember ever reading the Ted Williams' last-at-bat essay.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml

RIP.

I hate to sound all Shakey-esque but I am the only person who found much of his prose a little bloated and dull?

I didn't find it dull, but bloated...at times, yes.

I really enjoyed his memoir, Self-Consciousness, and some of his essays on art.

Didn't care much for any of the novels I've read ("Witches of Eastwick" has a few jokes at the expense of a particularly New England brand of starchy Protestantism, though), but since I haven't read the Rabbit books I should shut up.

aw ;_; the rabbit books are so great

I liked that one story about the grandparent telling his daughter "remember, darling, our philosophy of child-rearing was benign neglect."

I guess that'd be this: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1200/updike/sstory.html

A couple years back I hated this guy because I had this idea that he had set the template for boring overwritten literary fiction and that all he wrote about was New England college professors having unfulfilling affairs with other New England college professors. Then I read the first Rabbit book and shut up about all that. The guy was a master. RIP.

hoos i did the same exact thing

should the Rabbit novels be read in chronological order?

yes

I read them all over the course of a single summer, and it made for a very satisfying experience.

Anticipating an elegy from Nicholson Baker. This book rules:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517EES0DHXL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

i liked gertrude & claudius

Times obit.

I've never read any of his longer work, but have always meant to. Will get to Rabbit soon, I hope.

In honor - I read Rabbit Redux this weekend - all my fave writers seem to leaving this mortal coil ...

he did really beautiful things with language. i sort of always hated him, but i got all moved listening to his "this i believe" about the art of fiction on npr this afternoon.

In honor - I read Rabbit Redux this weekend

What, did you know he was going to die?

Only 76? Jeez.

Yes, that's not so old for an old writer, or an old person, at all. And he could have seemed, maybe did seem, by today's standards, older.

I daresay he was a greatly gifted writer. I can't shake the memory of, I think, a review, LRB I think, of his stories, that described how in one of them some old geezer checked into a hotel and met the young chambermaid, who within half an hour or so was performing oral sex on him. I thought that idea disgusting and vile. Whether that is typical of U's creative imagination I cannot say.

U&I is a smashing book, yes, and this really would seem to be the moment of moments for the also talented Baker.

he kinda reminds me of william dean howells. long shadow. honorary captain of the team. wrote tons (of everything. both of them. but both mainly known for their novels. which could be pretty damn similar in content.). champion of other u.s. writers. important champion of non-u.s. writers. knew everyone. read less and less with every passing year.

I hated John Updike. My mother called me just to say, "Hey, your favorite person died!" in a sarcastic voice.

Next on my list? Joyce Carol Oates. If that woman doesn't stop writing within the next few years, I will lose my shit.

just wondering, have u actually read much of either of them?

he kinda reminds me of william dean howells.

I just started reading Howells--he's ace!

Didnt know he had cancer.
The "Rabbit" books are among my favourites,
i love this guy writing.
to me,he is superior to Roth and Bellow of the same generation.
RIP

I've read plenty of Howells, and if Updike ever wrote anything as trenchant as A Modern Instance or A Hazard of New Fortune, I've missed it -- but, like I said upthread, maybe the Rabbit novels qualify. I need to read'em.

Rabbit, Run gave me more of a sense of everyday life in the 1950s than any other novel or film or play I can think of. I think the same may be true of his other Rabbit novels in their corresponding decades. He had a full life; he got his work done.

one of the great masters of realism for sure

I've been finding his recent essays on art in the NY Review fascinating. I think it's great when fiction writers write art criticism: what magnificent descriptive powers he had! I don't know any of his other work but for these art essays alone, RIP.

Odd Jobs and Hugging the Shore flaunt an impressively catholic range, but he had his limits. Reviewing Alan Holinghurst's The Spell in the late nineties, he professed shock that these people called homosexuals would dare to write novels about trysts and roundelays that didn't involve women.

"I've read plenty of Howells, and if Updike ever wrote anything as trenchant as A Modern Instance or A Hazard of New Fortune, I've missed it"

i wasn't comparing them talent-wise. they just remind me of each other as far as the place they both occupied culturally.

"to me,he is superior to Roth and Bellow of the same generation."

yikes! eh, what are ya gonna do. to me, roth and bellow are two of the finest writers of the 20th century. whereas, i can't even read updike's novels. (got no problem with his lit crit for the most part though.)

he seemed like a swell dude though! r.i.p. and all that. he used to hang out in my library when i was a kid. you know, reading.

I saw Updike give a reading in St. Paul about 10 years ago with a friend who wrote his undergrad thesis on him. My friend, a bit of a smart-ass, also went with me to see Nicholson Baker give a reading, and he asked Baker to sign a copy of Memories of the Ford Administration.

i bought the first rabbit book probably around 1990 and it sat unread for about 15 years until i think i finally threw it out or something. something about it and his work seemed very "of another time" a time i had no real interest in. i have read some of his crit stuff and it's ok. william dean howells is great and i'd recommend him to anyone, but i think he's a lost cause.

Endowed with a journalist’s eye

Michiko knockin my boy's manhood.

I saw Updike give a reading in St. Paul about 10 years ago with a friend who wrote his undergrad thesis on him. My friend, a bit of a smart-ass, also went with me to see Nicholson Baker give a reading, and he asked Baker to sign a copy of Memories of the Ford Administration.

:)

"bought the first rabbit book probably around 1990 and it sat unread for about 15 years until i think i finally threw it out or something"

read Rabbit is rich, and "rest",they are his finest work.
"run" can be annoying,agreed.

Roth is great,Bellow is great, but Updike is my favourite, cause he isnt melodramatic, and he knows
how to write about nuances and small details in life, and maybe thats why somepeople think he is boring.
but in terms of realism and characters psychology he is the best.
i'd say Bellow is the best philosopher, Roth is the best story-teller and Updike writes the best prose.
authentic and gentle realism is a formula that will always work for me (and it didnt work for him only in "redux" which was the contrary in style - and failed cause of that)

he's from the town next-door to where my mom grew up around the same time. i always recognized that penn dutch sensibility in updike.

rip

I generally don't post on these RIP threads, but I gotta say this really sucks. And since nobody has mentioned it, I just wanted mention that anybody who likes his Rabbit novels (I especially love the first one, didn't make it through all four) should really also check out his novel Couples, from 1968.

i have only read Self Consciousness (the memoir) and Rabbit Run but they are both great and the writing, the sentences, are often breathtakingly precise and beautiful.

James Wood wrote very critically about Updike, in the essay in THE BROKEN ESTATE. Maybe he elsewhere wrote less critically and more favourably? Not sure I know.

Mandarin vs. Brahmin fite!

I thought Wood argued that Updike's theological positions were muddled.

He did.

does that really matter in, like, a novel? or did he mean like in his essays?

I haven't read the novel in question.

The God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless bird.

s

S. is a great epistolatory novel of his - I'd forgotten about that one.

Something that Updike and Baker have in common that I love is how both of them really worked to be the first ever to describe something. Like, in Rabbit at Rest, there's a moment when Rabbit gets up to pee in the middle of the night, and he aims for the inside of the bowl so that he wouldn't make a loud splashing sound, and he may be the first guy (outside of Penthouse Forum) to get this recognizable detail right.

Weirdly, I think the first time this was used in a book was in Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life...': there's a bit about not wanting to wake your gulag cell-mates with the sound of piss going into the bucket, so you have to aim for the bucket's inner side.

Somewhat off-topic, but at least I'm not slinging insults, I guess.

And thank you, that's very interesting!

The quietly-pissing-in-bucket detail is also in "Last Emperor," I think.

I'm feeling poll potential here.

First appearance was in Vergil, I think. "Of piss and the bowl I sing..."

From Thursday's NY Times, looks like he wrote some poems at the end:

Requiem
By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: January 28, 2009

It came to me the other day

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

Hm.

Slate has published a round-up of tributes from various folks, including Mr. Donald Fagen:

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the late David Foster Wallace said that many of John Updike's protagonists—"clearly stand-ins for the author himself"—are "incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous," and "self-pitying," and that many younger readers consider him to be the worst of the generation of "Great Male Narcissists" that included Mailer, Roth, Exley, and Bukowski. As a reader who came of age in the bohemian subculture of the '60s, I've found myself reacting in much the same way to Updike's "old school" attitude toward women and to the sometimes near-sociopathic detachment that seems to be part of the profile of his leading characters.

And yet I remember my excitement when the publication of a new installment of the Rabbit Angstrom series was announced. Each novel was a reality check on the preceding decade, revealing a just-lived chunk of time in startling new ways. If you want to know what it really felt like to live through the late '60s, forget Easy Rider: check out the creepy, entropic nightmare that is Rabbit Redux. That strangely nourishing epic Rabbit is Rich nails down the Me Decade in the most entertaining possible way. And throughout the series, as in all of Updike's work, we're treated to those Proustian waves of prose in which Rabbit, magically endowed with his creator's extraordinary perceptual depth and descriptive power, tries to find some key to eternity in the details of the physical world.

i really loved parts of that big early years short story collection:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c1/c8273.jpg

spent a lot of time with this

Ditto. Great photos of the man himself on the frotn and back, too.

its uneven but that shit never bothers me in stuff like that, where its so obviously psuedo-autobiographical ('personal' seems like the wrong word for some reason) + also where you can practically feel him figuring out/learning how to write -- its like u get a sneak peak inside the writers brains while hes figuring shit out -- maybe not as 'perfect' as the rabbit novels but its interesting for different reasons on entirely different levels than that stuff at least to me

of course without the good stuff to build to it would probably make this process seem less interesting

My Updike S/D - search:

The light verse in e.g. Carpentered Hen. Heck, I like Serious Poetry (even have an English degree'n'shit), but I think it takes a heart of stone and a fun-free soul to not be charmed by stuff like "Lament, for Cocoa." "The scum has come / my cocoa's cold..."

The Centaur. Some of this ground may be overtrodden but I think the realist/mythological mix is interesting.

Roger's Version. Again, he's a fine realist but pleases me most in his departures from strict realist/naturalist description of the daily details of UMC-New Englandy lives.

Similarly, there are several stories that leave realistic ground in Problems. In the title story, a typically Updikean divorce is told through high-school-math-style story problems. One detail that stands out in my memory is a discussion of the different sounds made by different depths of driveway gravel.

Even more stories with fantasy/novelty elements populate Museums & Women. There's a cocktail party attended by microbes, an interview with an extinct mammal, and Jesus's later life in Japan. These are not gimmicky (for me), first because of their technical skill, and second because they provide such a contrast with the (let's face it) sameness of the rest of Updike's subject matter. After reading a few thousand pages of almost-interchangeable Updike protagonists, a single-celled animal or two is quite welcome.

After reading an awful lot of his books, I don't always come away with much attachment to particular characters or themes. What I do feel attached to is sentences. And there are some very fine sentences to be had. At the end of the (I think) second Rabbit book, there's a line like "all sorts of winged presences were making themselves felt in the air above the bed."

Another gem-sentence is at the end of a later story called "The Brown Chest," from The Afterlife: "...the sweetish deep cedary smell, undiminished, cedar and camphor and paper and cloth, the smell of family, family without end."

Destroy: well, as noted above, there's an interchangeability to some of his signature suburban characters and settings and situations. He would still be a giant had he written maybe five or six fewer books. I decline to pick which five or six, though (it almost doesn't matter).

Wait, no. I can say that Villages and Marry Me were unnecessary, doing nothing that hadn't been done in Couples. Some of the Bech material seems tossed-off (though I acknowledge the necessity of Bech as a sort of escape valve for Updike's id.)

I didn't much like Seek My Face, but probably it was a good idea for him to write it as a counterweight to all the maleness.

Martin Amis on Updike

He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence.

I've seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called 'pressure on the cortex'. It's as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption. He has produced an enormous body of work. He is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.

He alone could hold his head up with the great Jews - Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Singer - it was entirely typical of him that, as a sideline, he became a great Jewish novelist too, in the person of Henry Bech, the hero of several of his books. That seems to me to be an essential Updike trait, never being satisfied with any limitations always demanding far more than his fair share.

There aren't supposed to be extremes of uniqueness - either you are or you're not - but he was exceptionally sui generis. He himself was too much under the spell of Joyce, and in a novel like Couples you can see that he set himself the task of bringing Joyce to America. I don't think he could see this - the great stylists are the ones you shouldn't be influenced by, but it was a noble attempt and with a treasury as deep as Updike's he could afford to have a few near misses.

Joyce himself said that certain things were too embarrassing to be written down in black and white. Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It's as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye. I think he was probably of the pattern of his generation. As he said, 'My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.' The wild oats period came in early middle age.

For me, his greatest novels were the last two Rabbit books - Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. With that fourth novel in the tetralogy, he had the homerun with all the bases loaded. His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality. Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself 'How would Updike have done it?" This is a very cold day for literature.

A good tribute by Ian McEwan in today's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/31/john-updike-ian-mcewan-usa-american-novel-rabbit

I do not understand the appeal of John Updike.

too bad there isnt a 117 post thread discussing his appeal

(x-post)

The sustained brilliance of the writing, in particular similes, metaphors and descriptions of everyday life.

The plot I couldn't really care less about - though I do admire Roger's Version.

gotta mention also "the beauty of the lillies".
another quiet masterpiece

Someone compared him to Vermeer, and that's about right.

Amis's piece is very odd - it doesn't look written (it isn't punctuated well); I think it must have been a telephone monologue.

i think you are pretty much totally wrong

It's not the punctuation that bothers me as much as this in the Amis piece:

There aren't supposed to be extremes of uniqueness - either you are or you're not - but he was exceptionally sui generis. He himself was too much under the spell of Joyce, and in a novel like Couples you can see that he set himself the task of bringing Joyce to America.

For a start, the two sentences seem contradictory. And I don't personally see a particularly strong Joyce influence anyway.

Have you read Couples?

I must admit that I have it, but didn't finish reading it beyond 40 pages or so. What is particularly Joycean about it?

But "too much under the spell" suggests an influence that goes beyond one novel, I think?

You think I'm totally wrong in my daringly contentious view that Amis's words were perhaps a telephone interview rather than a written essay?

Why?

Knowing Amis as I do, I don't think he would write so carelessly, but I do think he would (does) talk with that kind of self-quoting eloquence.

pinefox what specifically in his punctuation do you take issue with

Hitchens' obit.

It wasn't worth the wait.

It doesn't say anything! I mean, anything besides "Updike was pretty good, and he has black grandchildren."

i knew that already

Haha guys I realize this is days old, but I think what Pinefox is referring to with Amis is stuff like, I dunno, the very first part of the first sentence:

He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast

I don't think Amis is suggesting that Updike built extra studies just to affect the way we pictured him, so I don't think Pinefox was off in supposing that someone like Amis, if he were punctuating this himself, might deploy a comma after the word "house"

OK - but what about the Joyce issue?

I think it might be a good idea to read all of Couples and answer it for yourself.

Not if I can get Nabisco's OTM opinion first ...

I don't really know what 'influenced by Joyce' means anymore. Is it stream of consciousness narrative, experimental prose, puns, wordplay and allusions, or careful episodic structuring based on a classical work? All of the above?

probably mostly #1 and 2 and a little bit of 6

Another possible place where the punctuation seems to nod:

That seems to me to be an essential Updike trait, never being satisfied with any limitations always demanding far more than his fair share.

Perhaps should be something like:

That seems to me to be an essential Updike trait: never being satisfied with any limitations, always demanding far more than his fair share. ?

Yeah, I think Pinefox's basic guess there -- that it reads more like articulate speech transcribed than it reads like Amis writing -- makes sense. Anyway. I'm not someone who knows a ton about Updike (or even Joyce, really), so no OTM opinion available on that one; sorry.

so, five months on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/my-fathers-tears-john-updike

a month of sundays is a weird novel, prob 1 of his worst ime

btw its hilarious upthread table criticizing jco for writting the same book again and again for 10-15 yrs, thats just patently untrue

Month of Sundays reads like an exercise in Nabokov pastiche performed by Updike for his own amusement, although I have enjoyed it on this level.