John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, at Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the small town of Shillington, which is around 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia. He was the only child of a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked steadily at writing but hardly ever got published. He was a top-flight student. Upon finishing high school, he enrolled at Harvard College, from which in 1954 he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English. He was interested in drawing and wanted to be a cartoonist, but after a year in England he returned to the United States and began contributing to The New Yorker, where for the next fifty-some years his short fiction, book reviews, and occasional poetry appeared regularly.
Updike, who died in 2009, is now regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American authors; in a hundred years, he will likely be regarded as one of the greatest American authors, ever. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick begins her essay "Citizen Updike" by designating her subject "one of Augustine's 'fair and fit'"--and, later, on the topic of the novels concerning the life and times of Rabbit Angstrom, refers to "a long flow of attention and feeling." The phrases are evocative of Updike's prodigious output as well as of a gift that was plainly nurtured by steady hard work. It's as if Cal Ripken could run very fast, too. Updike wrote more than twenty novels, a couple hundred stories, and a considerable amount of verse. His "occasional" prose, much of it reviews first published in The New Yorker, was collected, at least a half dozen times, in 850-page installments--Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, and Due Considerations are the ones I can see on our shelves from where I'm typing.
In a body of work this size a reader seeks guidance. I haven't read even half of it--I'm only a little over 50 and have to work for a living--but my recommendation, like that of a lot of other people, would be to start with the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. Read them straight through, in the order they appeared: Rabbit in the 1950s (Rabbit, Run); in the 1960s (Rabbit Redux); in the 1970s (Rabbit is Rich); and in the 1980s (Rabbit at Rest). It's a portrait of a man and of a country, the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. The author's concerns range from swingin' sexuality to Barthean theology, the in-between and spill-over being American middle-class life in four decades, including thousands of small artifacts fully rendered, catalouged, and integrated into the sprawling narrative, all of it conveyed in that controlled, effortless, shimmering flow described by Hardwick. Four great books, the latter two a little ahead, I think, of the first two, maybe only on account of being longer and,therefore, the better to luxuriate in.
If so inclined, the next step might be to become acquainted with some of Updike's other serial creations, like the Maples, Richard and Joan, whose problematic marriage is chronicled in a series of stories first collected in Too Far To Go and, later, with some additions, in an Everyman pocket edition, The Maples Stories. If you like these, proceed to The Early Stories, 1953-1975, another volume of luxurious length, more than a hundred short stories, including the baker's dozen or so concerning the Maples, which however you will want to read again anyway.
If you love all this as well as I you will by this point want to find your own way. But, of the other novels, I should say that I am a particular fan of Roger's Version, wherein religion, a steady theme, clashes with reason, the former championed by a manifest nut and the latter by an over-urbane divinity scholar. I also am a fan of the stories about the writer Henry Bech, who, while sharing Updike's vocation, seems in many respects his opposite--withdrawn, Jewish, cramped, and a winner of the Nobel prize. These fictions, also, have been collected in an Everyman edition, The Complete Henry Bech.
I think the criticism, collected in those 850-page tomes, is too easy to overlook. Rooting around in these volumes, first in the essays you think will interest you and then in the ones you at first thought maybe wouldn't, is like hanging out, for hours, with someone loquaicious, unpretentious, and really smart. It sometimes seems there is nothing he doesn't know about.
It's natural to be curious about the man who created this body of literature, but, to keep the length of this decently brief, I will mention only a couple of things that seem connected to his fiction.
Updike married young, in 1953, and was divorced 21 years later. According to his memoir, Self-Consciousness (I forgot to mention the autobiographical work, which includes another memoir, The Dogwood Tree), he took it hard: he felt like he "couldn't breathe" and "broke out" to such a degree that "my shoulders and neck [were] so encrusted I couldn't turn my head without pain." Like the Maples, who also divorced, Updike and his first wife had four children. He later remarried, and this one lasted till his death, of lung cancer, on January 27, 2009.
As a young man, Updike for a time felt he could not maintain the Christian faith in which he had been raised, and he took this hard, too. His reading became heavily theological, in particular the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, both of whom he unfailingly named when asked about authors who had "changed his life." In Odd Jobs, for example, he includes his response to a request, from a British newspaper, to contribute to a weekly section called "A Book that Changed Me." From Kierkegaard, Updike wrote, he eagerly took
the idea that subjectivity too has its rightful claims, amid all the desolating objective evidence of our insignificance and futility and final nonexistence; faith is not a deduction but an act of will, a heroism. So I took courage and thumbed my nose, in a sense, at the world, in imitation of Kierkegaard's proud, jeering, disorderly tone.
There is here perhaps more exhiliration than hard, good sense--and it is, I guess, his point that hard, good sense has its limits. Close readers of Updike's work will detect an abiding interest in things theological and a distinct, if in these times unconventional, religious sensibility. Perhaps one senses it most in the way things look--the manner, I mean, with which ordinary objects are charged with something resembling what the poet Hopkins called "God's grandeur."
In the interests of balance, he is not for everyone. Students, when asked to read a Rabbit novel, frequently express repugnance for the main character. I won't defend him. It's true that you will not feel about Rabbit Angstrom the way you are apt to feel about, say, Constantine Dimitrich Levin. But while the Russian may be ahead of the American in the likable department, I don't think he is a more representative specimen of humanity. Getting tired of Rabbit Angstrom reminds me of what Dr Johnson said about being tired of London: it's like being tired of life.
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