I've been debating doing a post about John Updike since word of his death, but was a little uncertain about my competency to do so. Although I am an avid, if unconstant, reader, I have little in the way of qualifications as a literary critic. (I think I took one English class in college.) But then I read this piece of crap by a callow, right wing virgin and figured what the fuck -- nothing I could write could ever approach this kind of travesty, this manifest aesthetic stupidity that seems to be an inherent part of being a reactionary. (I later read this critique, from the left side of the aisle, which is far more intelligent than what the Virgin Ben uttered, but struck me as also a bit stunted by virtue of imposing a political rather than artistic framework to judge the writing.)
Updike produced an enormous oeuvre -- a stunning number of novels, stories, criticism, and non-fiction -- and I have read relatively little of it. (One can argue that in so doing Updike devalued some of his greatness -- ,many great novelists are parsimonious with their public words, releasing only that which meets exacting standards -- others, like Updike seem to be the literary equivalent of MichaelCaine, an undeniably great actor who has appeared in travesties like "Jaws III" because, as he would put it, actors act -- I think in Updike's universe, writers write rather than agonize.) But I did read all of what I think is universally agreed to be his finest work -- the quartet of novels chronicling the life (and death) of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. (I am also grateful that I began reading the Rabbit series when I was in my 40s and had been married and a father for a sizable number of years -- at 25 I think I would have appreciated the aesthetics, but not necessarily grasped some of the hard truths conveyed in the crystaline prose.)
Rabbit is one of the great characters in American fiction, a flawed and utterly unheroic everyman, a former high school jock whose best days are already behind him in the first novel, "Rabbit Run." Despite his myriad shortcomings, I must confess an affection for him and a sense of identification with his restlessness. Rabbit thinks enough to be interesting, while never being a deep or systematic thinker. His politics are a bit shallow and always visceral --he is a perfect Republican of an era that now seems long ago, reflexively defensive of America and the bulk of the societal status quo, save for those changes that might help him get laid. We see Rabbit live from the tail end of the Eisenhower era through the Bush I days, convincingly buffeted by the changes around him, but all the while with politics as a background noise, as it is for most Americans.
It's amusing to see the Virgin Ben* attack Updike as some sort of leftist American hater, when in fact, he was by and large a small "c" conservative, a defender of the Vietnam War, a believer in God, and an unironic lover of his country, despite seeing clearly its warts. What clowns like Ben don't understand is that any asshole can write a political platform -- hell I could do it half asleep after drinking a fifth while watching TV. As Roy Edroso often points out, art isn't a manifestation of political positions -- it's an attempt to conjure up something invented that's realer than reality. And Updike, at his best, did that.
As for the more serious critiques of him -- that he's another straight, white, middle class, phallocentric misogynist -- well maybe. There are certainly aspects of that in his work. But every artist is to some degree a product of his or her time and place, whether we are talking about Jane Austen or Henry James or Ralph Ellison. Through Rabbit Angstrom, Updike conveys profound truths about life and death, truths that transcend race, gender, and nationality, while also giving a sense of the sweep of history, of a society struggling to live up to its egalitarian creed while the old rules crumble, and men go from the solidity of a skill (Rabbit is a lithographer initially) to the ephemera of being "in sales."
Well, I've gone on and on. I'll let Updike speak for a moment for himself, in a scene in which Rabbit, who has abandoned his wife and two children, returns to his home after their second child, a newborn, has drowned in the bathtub due to his wife's drinking and distraction resulting from his absence:
He lets himself into the apartment with his key and turns on all the lights as rapidly as he can. He goes into the bathroom and the water is still in the tub. Some of it has seeped away so the top of the water is an inch below a faint gray line on the porcelain but the tub is till more than half full. A heavy, calm volume, odorless, tasteless, colorless, the water shocks him like the presence of a silent person in the bathroom. Stillness makes a dead skin on its unstirred surface. There's even a kind of dust on it. He rolls back his sleeve and reaches down and pulls the plug; the water swings and the drain gasps. He watches the line of water slide slowly and evenly down the wall of the tub, and then with a crazed vortical cry the last of it is sucked away. He thinks how easy it was, yet in all His strength God did nothing. Just that little rubber stopper to lift.
You could give ten thousand Republican monkeys ten thousand keyboards and they collectively will never produce a paragraph that good. R.I.P. fellow North shore man.
* The "Virgin Ben" is a trademarked snark of "Sadly, No!" -- it is used here without permission, but hopefully approval.
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