Writer Katie Roiphe does a wonderful job of defending the late novelist John Updike against
the onslaught of posthumous nay saying
regarding his reputation in her current piece in Slate. Cheap shots , she
essentially declares, quoting the more notable snipers like David Foster Wallace and James Wood. The
biggest complaint isn’t that Updike wrote badly; in fact he is pilloried for
writing too well, too often. Roiphe puts the lie to the accusations. Another
charge is that the departed novelist wrote the same novel over and over,
for decades, decorating his narrowness
in ornate language; the sheer perfume
around the prose was meant to distract us from the paucity of ideas, the lack
of variety. One wonders how much Updike these critics have read. There are
advantages to reading deeply, and slowly.
Updike has written
novels that resemble one another in many respects over the years, but this not
issuing the same novel "over and over". I would say that he is
thematically less repetitive than Philip Roth, who is often cited as the
American writer most likely to be our next Nobel Laureate in literature. Updike
has themes and ideas that he works in his many novels and short story
collections, but there are usually new variations, nuance, new ironies to
experience. Most good novelists you can name do this, Updike, though, was
especially keen at setting his ideas--spiritual aridity, infidelity, the denial
of death through manic activity and material acquisition , the eventual irony
as Life trudges forward unmindful of character pride or expectations--in settings
one would associate with him.
The astonishing thing about Updike is how much and how often
he experimented with form and subject, purposefully and with success straying
from the nice little container his critics try to place him in. We can also had
"Gertrude and Claudius", his lively prequel to "Hamlet",
"Terrorist", an especially intense character study of an
American-born jingoistic, and "Brazil", a favorite of mine, an inspired
turn at Magic Realism. These novels, as well the novels “The Coup”, “Witches of Eastwick”, and “Seek My Face” , demonstrate
an impressive range for any novelists, regardless of how high their current
literary stock might happen to be. An especially irksome , which is to say knee-jerk charge leveled against the novelist is that he is an egotist and an unreconstructed narcissist , someone who fashioned a high literary style to glide through a narrow range of matters that reflects a self absorption bordering on psychological defect. That charge essentially consists that Updike failed at a supposed grand responsibility to connect with a community of readers who expect the characters to be sufficiently sympathetic who retain the possibility for redemption.
This is patent nonsense, since the principle duty of the novelist, the poet, the artist isn't to second guess their talent and attempt a version of accomplishment and truth find as someone else might imagine it, but to explore their own perceptions in some detail against and within a variety of different situations and to see precisely where their ideas, concepts, fears take them. Calling this narcissism is a convenient way of avoid the task of understanding Updike's fictional world. I would also substitute the word egotism with confidence--the artist worth paying attention is the one who commits themselves fully to a style that allows them to attempt many different things to the fullest degree; to the degree that Updike wrote a considerable number of novels that are not your typical mainstream inventions--he dared to experiment with his famous style--and in doing kept his persistent themes viable and capable of yielding more nuances to his tales of the frailty of the human will, he is a master. No less than Henry James, no less than Faulkner, no less than Nabokov. Updike's stock should be much, much higher than it is, and Roiphe's article makes a persuasive argument in Updike's defense. Updike was the best American novelist while he lived, I think, and it sticks in the craw of his detractors that there are not others who demonstrated such a brilliant consistency over many decades of writing.
This is patent nonsense, since the principle duty of the novelist, the poet, the artist isn't to second guess their talent and attempt a version of accomplishment and truth find as someone else might imagine it, but to explore their own perceptions in some detail against and within a variety of different situations and to see precisely where their ideas, concepts, fears take them. Calling this narcissism is a convenient way of avoid the task of understanding Updike's fictional world. I would also substitute the word egotism with confidence--the artist worth paying attention is the one who commits themselves fully to a style that allows them to attempt many different things to the fullest degree; to the degree that Updike wrote a considerable number of novels that are not your typical mainstream inventions--he dared to experiment with his famous style--and in doing kept his persistent themes viable and capable of yielding more nuances to his tales of the frailty of the human will, he is a master. No less than Henry James, no less than Faulkner, no less than Nabokov. Updike's stock should be much, much higher than it is, and Roiphe's article makes a persuasive argument in Updike's defense. Updike was the best American novelist while he lived, I think, and it sticks in the craw of his detractors that there are not others who demonstrated such a brilliant consistency over many decades of writing.