I've just read over my recent post on John Updike and got a chuckle over the way in which my attempt at achieving a critical "balance," by giving voice in the last paragraph to the less enthusiastic responses of other readers, shifted so quickly into more praise. I am almost incapable of saying a bad word about Updike. So let me try again--at first, by quoting someone else. Of Updike, the critic Harold Bloom wrote that he is "a minor novelist with a major style." You see here, perhaps, that Updike's achievement is sufficiently variegated as to recommend the back-handed compliment as an available weapon. What of the claim that he is a "minor novelist"? Updike's characters, unlike Dostoevski's, go to the dentist, which may be part of what lies behind the insult: in the work of major novelists, characters commit murder and shake their fists at God but never undergo a root canal. I'd rather reread all four Rabbit novels than figure out whether there is more to Bloom's case than that.
But let us postulate that the ordinary events of daily life are an apt subject for the novelist. It seems to me that one considerable aspect of the quotidian slog is largely absent in Updike: the world of work, making a living. Rabbit is a Linotyper, then inherits a Toyota dealership--an unusual career arc, and we do not often see him on the job. Bech, the author, and winner of the Nobel prize, has a yet more exotic means of earning a living. In the first of the Maples stories, we are told that Richard Maple works in advertising, but it doesn't carry through; later, when he's divorced, we follow him as he prosecutes a new daily routine that still does not, however, involve going to the office. It's hard to say for sure what he does for money. He gets scientific monographs in the mail. Maybe he's graduated from advertising to authorship or a professorship. In Roger's Version, there is a professor, but I don't remember him teaching or voting on anyone's tenure. Here is how that novel begins:
I have been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile--there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living.
There are 325 pages to go but that is pretty much all there is about what he does to get paychecks. If there is a stunning counterexample to this general trend, I have in my feedings at Updike's ample table not yet come to it. Therefore, I nominate the workaday world as Updike's one blind spot. Being one of Augustine's fit and fair, he probably never had a chance to study at close range the eight-to-five that takes up so much of so many lives, and it's not really a subject you can read up on and then make fiction out of your researches.
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