Just over two months ago, on November 12, John Updike spoke cheerfully to a sold-out Seattle audience at Benaroya Hall. During the two-hour Seattle Arts & Lectures event, Updike discussed his new novel, The Widows of Eastwick (a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick), the writer’s craft, the newly-elected president, and the Seattle Art Museum’s Edward Hopper exhibit. It would be one of his final talks before his death Tuesday in Beverly Farms, Mass., at the age of 76.
Back in November, KCTS 9 contacted Updike in the hopes of interviewing him before his appearance at Seattle Arts & Lectures. His publicist informed the station that Updike was suffering from pneumonia and would not be able to sit for another interview. On Wednesday morning, the Seattle P-I, book critic John Marshall reported that although Updike considered cancelling his last four West Coast speaking engagements (including the Seattle event) due to the illness, he ultimately insisted on making them because people had already paid to attend.
This decision is emblematic of Updike’s ineffable good spirit both in his life and in his writing. Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, was a notoriously prolific author and essayist, writing 50 novels, countless literary essays, and several collections’ worth of artistic criticism in his lifetime. Updike’s most famous work was a four-book-long sequence of novels (written, interestingly enough, in back-to-back decades: 1960, 1971, 1981, and 1990) all following the life of Henry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a high school basketball star turned suburban used car salesman, as he undergoes a mid-life crisis.
Like fellow literary giants Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, to which he is often compared, Updike’s work tackled issues facing the 20th century American middle class—job boredom, loneliness, overconsumption, marriage, family, travel, and sex. His controversial (and wildly successful) novel Couples, published in 1968, was a literary study of adultery among several middle-class Massachusetts couples--a setting just autobiographical enough to make his critics, and his neighbors, sweat. His famous short story “A&P,” about a grocery store clerk’s interaction with three girls wearing “nothing but bathing suits” is a required reading for high-schoolers across the country.
Updike was no less active a literary critic, opining on authors as familiar as Henry James and Marcel Proust and as new-age and experimental as the French nihilist author Michel Houellebecq. Updike was a generous and fair-minded critic (although the American critic and scholar Harold Bloom once appraised these same qualities, less charitably, as evidence of Updike’s “toothlessness”), favoring novels and criticism that energized him and sparked his active imagination.
The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Updike was “a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.”
As Kakutani rightly points out, in an age of “willful specialization,” Updike was a true literary jack-of-all-trades, a thoughtful and egalitarian critic and author who prized novels alongside poetry, plays, criticism, and visual art, giving each their due. He was an author who kept his eyes and his mind engaged and open. Although the American literary establishment is less that they are now closed, Updike has left the world with a truly substantial and multifarious literary oeuvre—and that, thankfully, will always be around.
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