John Updike

When John Updike died a few days ago, it occurred to me that I've read quite a bit of his work. He has written about sixty volumes of novels, criticism, essays and poetry, so it would take some dedication to have read them all, but I have read nine of his novels, his autobiography, and no telling how many of his short stories and book reviews. As far as that goes, after Philip Roth, he is the literary novelist I've read the most.

Updike is known for his finely crafted studies of suburbia, particularly the sexual wanderings of said class. The first book of his I read was A Month of Sundays, which touched upon one of his favorite themes--the philandering or cuckolded clergyman. I read the book as a teenager, and just what I was doing reading this will tell you I wasn't a typical teen. I've also read his two re-tellings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, an epistolary novel S., and Roger's Version.

I've also read his two Pulitzer-Prize winners, the third and fourth installments of his tetralogy about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich and and Rabbit at Rest. I read Rabbit Is Rich just after college, and it's one of the better novels I've ever read. Updike created the character in 1960, an ex-college athlete who goes on to ride the waves of American success and decline. Every ten years or so Updike revisited him to take a look at just where the American dream was residing, and along the way Rabbit had ups and downs, affairs, and dealt with his growing children. In Rabbit at Rest, as the title suggests, Updike buried his hero, killing him off with a massive heart attack while playing a pickup basketball game. There may be no greater saga in American literature.

Though Updike will be best remembered as the chronicler of suburban adultery, he ventured into other avenues. The novel that probably earned him the most money was The Witches of Eastwick, a novel that flirted with the supernatural and was made into a big Hollywood movie. He also wrote novels about a Jewish novelist (Updike was most decidedly not Jewish) named Bech, and a retelling of Tristan and Isolde set in Brazil (called Brazil). One of his last books was The Terrorist, a response to the current political climate and a point of view tale about a Muslim boy who turns to terrorism. Some of these books were tin-eared, and signaled that he really shouldn't have varied from his classic milieu.

I had the chance to meet Updike about ten or so years ago. When my mother lived in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the library was holding fund-raising efforts to remodel. Updike, who lived in a nearby town, donated his time to do a book-signing. I bought a copy of all four Rabbit novels in one volume and he signed it. During our brief face time I asked him about the Red Sox, because Updike is well known to literate baseball fans for writing one of the best pieces about the game ever written: "Kid Bids Hub Fans Adieu," about Ted Williams' last game. Roger Clemens had just signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and I asked Updike about that and he said it was time for him to go. He was unfailingly gracious to everyone who spoke with him. After that trip I returned home to read his autobiography, Self-Consciousness, which is one of the better memoirs I've ever read.

So now John Updike is also at rest, along with Rabbit and the rest of his characters. He was a true giant of letters.