HOME / culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

Slate Bids Updike AdieuEditors and writers remember John Updike.

Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 3:24 PM ET

(Continued from page 3)

RSS

I read Updike avidly for many years (although to read him completely would mean turning over one's life to his prodigious output). I don't have a very retentive memory, but Updike was able to put scenes in my head that have stayed there for decades. I just looked up the O. Henry-esque opening story, "Friends from Philadelphia" from his 1950s collection, The Same Door in which the 16-year-old protagonist, sent by his mother to buy a bottle of $2 wine for company, is refused service by a clerk. The boy is rescued by the big, bluff father of the neighbor girl he lusts after, who completes the mission by handing the teenager $1.26 in change and a bottle of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1937. Then there is his 1971 description of a television commercial for natural gas, "Commercial," in his collection Problems and Other Stories. This isn't the finest short story he ever wrote, but I remember being galvanized by it. I had seen the same commercial myself dozens of times, but Updike's second-by-second dissection was as powerful as an experiment in quantum physics in demonstrating how acute observation utterly changes the thing being observed.

William Pritchard, author
Two personal memories of Updike. He came to Amherst College in 1983 to receive an honorary degree. At the president's party the night before, he ran into a woman who informed him that her mother had been disgusted by Rabbit Is Rich (doubtless, the sex writing). Updike smiled his most elaborate smile, raised his eyebrows, and said, most winningly, "I hope she won't be here tonight!" That seemed to me very resourceful. He then proceeded to be introduced to a trustee who hadn't the faintest notion of what was going on. "And what do you do?" the trustee asked Updike. Another winning smile and the confession, given rather haltingly, "I ... write."

Always charming, he had his unsmiling side that rarely surfaced, but when it did, you knew it. I once wrote a letter to the New York Review of Books defending him against aspersions cast on his recent books (especially Roger's Version) by Frederick Crews. In it, I said he had written a dozen memorable short stories that would last, etc. A note from him said thanks, but allowed to me how he'd written, by his count, a good many more than a dozen memorable ones. Nicholas Delbanco said this week on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, when asked about Updike's sunny nature, that the velvet glove could contain an iron fist, and this was an instance of it.

Donald Fagen, co-founder, Steely Dan
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.

Wendy Lesser, author, editor, the Threepenny Review
Though John Updike was never one of my personal literary talismans (the way, say, Norman Mailer was), I always considered him an essential and indeed somehow permanent part of the American landscape, so I am both shocked and sorry to hear that he is gone. I am also sorry because, as he got older, I liked his work better and better: The virtuosity and ironic coolness of the earlier novels was being transmuted, book by book, into something much weightier and more moving if less self-consciously perfect. This was heartening to see and interesting to read, and I would have liked to go on reading it for the rest of my life. His death is a loss for everyone in the writing world, and we can ill afford such losses these days.

John Swansburg, culture editor, Slate
Beverly, Mass., is a town on the state's second-best cape, sandwiched between better-known neighbors—Salem, famous for its witches, and Gloucester, for its fish sticks. When I was a kid, Beverly posted signs trumpeting its status as the "Birthplace of the American Navy," a claim disputed, convincingly, by a town in Pennsylvania called Philadelphia.

Beverly had this going for it, though: John Updike lived there. My mom used to see him at the post office, but it wasn't until I was in college that I crossed paths with him. I was back in Beverly for the summer, working as a cashier at the local supermarket. (Foolishly, I had accepted this position despite having been versed in its indignities by "A&P"; I found myself hoping a manager would reprimand some improperly attired girl so I could quit in protest.) On my days off, I'd often visit the Beverly Public Library. It was there that I saw Updike, wearing a yellow alligator polo and a belt from the Myopia Hunt Club.

After an amiable chat with the reference librarians, he made his way to the stacks. I followed him, loitering nearby while he located the volumes he was after (on Helen Keller, I noticed). Under normal circumstances, I'm not the type to accost a celebrity. But I knew tomorrow it was back to bagging cat food. Here was a chance to rescue the summer of '98 from oblivion. So as he made his way back to the elevator, I caught up to him, getting aboard just as the elevator doors were closing.

"Are you John Updike?" I blurted.