In defence of Updike

PRESENT TENSE:LIFE IS BRIEF. In John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, enjoying the blessed fruits of a lucrative Toyota dealership during the Reagan years, is rolling in krugerrands and enthusiastically contemplating a spot of wife-swapping.

A few short years later, in Rabbit at Rest,Harry's heart, "tired and stiff and full of crud", is giving up. His eternally disappointed and disappointing son, Nelson, looks on haplessly:

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father’s direction. “Don’t die, Dad, don’t!” he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn’t leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.

“Well Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

Fade to black, as they say in the movies. In the poem Perfection Wasted, Updike, a churchgoer who didn't appear to believe in God, reflected with wintry humour on "another regrettable thing about death", the disappearance, complete and irrecoverable, of the whole life's work that is the self.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act. Who will do it again? That’s it; no one; imitators and descendants aren’t the same

John Updike was pretty good on death. And on life and sex, on art and golf, on philosophy and literary criticism. Over 45 years as a published writer, he produced 30 novels, 14 volumes of short stories, nine of poetry and 10 collections of essays and criticism. Some would say he wrote too much – and such a great, long spray of words inevitably led to unevenness There are several Updike books I wish I’d never read. But there are several others I can’t imagine not having read. There are sentences, passages, entire stories that leave the reader blinking at their brilliance and beauty. Such facility with words, inevitably provoked some negative responses over the years. Updike always had his detractors, from the hairy-chested school of American writers who ruled the roost when he began publishing in the 1950s, to later readers who complained his female characters were sketchy, two-dimensional foils for his male protagonists.

And Nelson Angstrom’s generation was even less forgiving. David Foster Wallace (who himself died a few months ago) summed up their case for the prosecution: “For the young educated adults of the 60s and 70s, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Mr Updike’s evocation of the libidinous self appeared redemptive and even heroic. But the young educated adults of the 90s – who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr Updike wrote about so beautifully – got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.”

You can see his point. But it seems a little unfair to blame Updike for the Me Generation; Couples, his 1968 novel of extramarital fluid-swapping among well-to-do suburbanites, became a bestseller because of its apparently turned-on, tuned-in subject matter (and explicit sex), but it's not exactly a happy-clappy hymn to sexual liberation.

If his theme was often the priapic solipsism of white, middle-class men in the years since the 1960s, well, that’s hardly surprising, given his own background. As a subject, it’s hardly unimportant, whatever the detractors might say. And, while Updike was a brilliant chronicler of social change in the US, his real achievement was in finding beauty and transcendence within the apparent banalities of contemporary life. Half-anaesthetised by pop culture and junk goods, Rabbit sleepwalks through the world, dreaming libidinous dreams of money, food and sex. He thinks unsayable stuff about women and black people. Sometimes he does terrible, embarrassing things, and the consequences are often very funny. All this against the backdrop of a US that seems in permanent decline, and all the more beautiful for it – or is that just the self-serving fantasy of middle age?

In the week of his death, we should pause to celebrate not just the novelist and short-story writer, but also the poet, critic and essayist. The tradition he represents is threatened on several fronts: by the illiteracy of an educational system that privileges self-expression over coherence; by the equally illiterate babblings of self-appointed academic elites; by the remorseless pressure of the mass market; and by the decline of the printed word. As the traditional model of publishing that sustained his work shrinks (this week, for example, the Washington Postaxed its book section), will the internet throw up new spaces where his kind of writing – precise, cultured, wide-ranging, elegant, informed – can survive or even thrive? Let's hope so, although Updike himself warned that "the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets." Let's hope that in this, at least, he was wrong.