Updike's Version
John Updike's death hits so hard because nobody has written about it as perfectly and for as long as he has--and he died all the same. Apparently, writing protects you only from life. I liked the Rabbit books, or the Rabbit prose, but after reading Self-Consciousness and Roger's Version, I felt we knew Updike's terrible idea of what he'd be thinking, or half-thinking, as he accepted oblivion. He writes somewhere of a man who, on his death-bed, realizes that he's utterly lost interest in the laws of physics because facts, in fact, no longer mattered. In Rabbit At Rest, Harry Angstrom thinks, clenched, what the people on that Pan Am flight over Lockerbie were thinking as the plane fell to earth, and he catches himself and thinks, we are all falling toward the earth, just a little more slowly. If Updike can die, then who won't? Listen to this wonderful interview of Updike in 2000 by Chris Lydon, who is, thank God, still alive.
Updike was a great writer. An unrepentent sexist but -- the excellence of his writing mitigated, and possibly neutralized, his condescension to the opposite sex, over time.
Like John Cheever, Updike described the essential social contract of his time, rendered in the nomenclature of suburban references.
He will be missed. Even by those who were, from time to time, gobsmacked by his effrontery.
January 29, 2009 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great tribute, this. If Updike can die, then who won't? I love it, and Rabbit would surely have pondered on this to the reader's delight.
January 29, 2009 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I Dunno. Updike wrote better sentences and paragraphs than anybody else I've read; but when I finished a whole story or a whole book,the total seemed less than the sum of the shimmering, exquisitely sculpted parts. Weird, but there it is.
January 30, 2009 9:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Try "The Afterlife--and Other Stories." Especially now.
January 30, 2009 9:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
"If Updike can die, than who won't?"
Um... thank you?
Seriously, wonderful.
January 31, 2009 1:44 AM | Reply | Permalink