John Updike Was Just Fantastic

American readers are lucky to have him.

Back in college, and it seems so long ago now, a theatre history professor who The Middlebrow liked a lot lamented on behalf of all the hopeful young novelists in the room and in the world that the greats of his generation, “Updike, Bellow, Mailer and Roth” would not step out of the way. They wrote and published into the 21st century, chronicling a changing country from that “self-actualized” point of view that seemed to dominate the post-World War II decades.

Around the time my professor worried, we were all reading Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. David Foster Wallace shellacked John Updike’s novel Toward the End of Time calling it the worst of the author’s work to have ever been published and extending his attack to all of the previous generation of literary greats that my professor had mentioned, though Wallace left Saul Bellow out of the camp of “the Great Male Narcissists.” Of course, we all have our heroes. I notice that Wallace also spared Thomas Pynchon, a more experimental writer and often more interesting, but definitely a peer of the GMNs.

Updike, Bellow, Mailer and Roth are all gone now. Roth never received the Nobel Prize that he had doubtless earned and Updike showed up as a character in HBO’s Julia, just as the Middlebrow had downloaded his 1988 novel, S. from Bookbub, the remainder table of the digital economy.

Updike might not be front of mind these days but he’s truly a great writer and deserves. spot in our pantheon. His 1962 short story, A&P is burned into the minds of so many literature-prone middle school boys for the way it timelessly captures the yearnings of young male sexuality. The “Rabbit” series of novels chronicles America’s postwar prosperity, its decline during the 1970s (the start of globalization) and its attempted renewal. The Witches of Eastwick is a hilarious story of relationship and body horror, whether as a novel or movie.

S. isn’t considered one of Updike’s greats but it is so skillful. This epistolary tale is about a wealthy New England woman who joins a yoga cult at an ashram in Arizona after realizing that her physician husband, who she supported financially and emotionally throughout her career, has taken her for granted and perhaps fallen out of love with her.

What struck The Middlebrow, reading this little gem for the first time, is Updike’s sheer skill. This is how we’re introduced to Sarah Worth, a descendant of Hester Prynne who has named her daughter Pearl, and living in an 80s version of Hawthorne:

“SHE had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication.”

And then there’s her genteel financial literacy. Even as she allows a duplicitous Arizona shaman to rip her off, we get observations like: “As to the stocks—I had intended to sell only half but then couldn’t decide which ones and since everybody agrees the market can’t keep rising like it has been I told the broker at Shearson Lehman to go and unload them all.”

And, in this book about a materialistic American trying to find nothingness, we get Sarah’s real take on things and baubles: “Why do Americans always think they should feel guilty about their things? I loved our things. Things are what we strive for, what all the waves in the air tell us to strive for—things are the stuff of our dreams and then like Eve and Adam digesting the apple we must feel so guilty.” Meanwhile, the guru complains constantly about the volume of food eaten by his disciples and muses the Americans would eat the whole world down to the first were the Russians not there to contain them.

All in all S. is a bauble of a book. People call it minor Updike, but to the Middlebrow, minor Updike is better than most other things. Well worth some time and, because it’s so expertly rendered, it reads quickly. It moves cover to cover in the time it takes to catch a movie and a half.