This articulates a lot of my own affection for Updike (and also his influence upon my own fiction):
Eternally caught between Earth and the angels
DAVID BERGEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
January 30, 2009 at 4:19 PM EST
Winnipeg — On my desk at my office, to the right of my keyboard, lies John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, the final book in his Rabbit tetralogy. It has been there for a number of weeks. I can't recall any more what I was looking for, perhaps a certain line, or an example of how Updike managed to write in the free-indirect style, inhabiting Rabbit Angstrom's mind. Rabbit is a slave and a seeker, a religious doubter, a fornicator who worships at the altar of cock and coin, a man who tries to crawl back into the light but always returns on bended knee to his hollow and insufficient self, to his idols of gold, golf and sex.
If Rabbit hungers after the body, so Updike, his creator, seemed to hunger after righteousness. His short stories, with titles like Dentistry and Doubt and The Christian Roommates, were explorations of uncertainty. One could argue that all of his writing and his thinking came down to the matter of faith and doubt. Perhaps this is why I fell in love with Updike; he was a writer who took the time to ask questions about God, as his character David does in a story called Pigeon Feathers. After David shoots six pigeons in the family barn, he bends to study his kill, and “with a feminine, slipping sensation that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole creation by refusing to let David live forever.”
Updike himself created as if he were aiming for everlasting life. “Art,” he wrote, “hopes to sidestep mortality with feats of attention, of harmony, of illuminating connection,” though he also said that his many published books were beginning to feel like a too-long tail. I discovered Updike in The New Yorker. I was immediately taken with his stories of common folk whose lives and relationships were fraught and messy. I went back and read the early novels and stories, loving The Centaur, a hugely funny novel, and then stumbled upon a story called Wife-Wooing, a slight tale, what he called a “risqué monologue,” but one simple enough to emulate, I believed, as a writer who was starting out.
I tried my own version of it and failed. I was not free enough; there was a liberty in Updike's writing, a pushing away of those who would look over the writer's shoulder. There was also tremendous curiosity for how things worked, for the jobs his characters toiled at, and for the shapes and texture of objects in the world. What he wanted, he wrote, was “to give the mundane its beautiful due,” and he did this effortlessly, whether it was a description of a golf club – with its sexual overtones – or the delving into the workings of computers and mathematics in Roger's Version.
And then there was the sex. Updike was extremely frank in his descriptions of sex. His novel Couples was a bestseller not because it was his best book, but because it was a fervent exploration of marriage, domestic chaos and graphic coupling. I like the way Updike wrote about sex. Nothing puritan about him. Nothing squeamish. The physical (Updike approached death and sex with equanimity and curiosity) was paramount, because in the end, we are left with the body, this frail shell that ultimately betrays us.
Of course, there are the spiritual and psychological and intellectual seams, but essentially, for Updike's characters, the key to living forever is to be found in sex. Self-deception unchecked. Take Alfred Schweigen, in the story The Music School, who drives his seven-year-old daughter to her music lessons. “I love taking her, I love waiting for her, and I love driving her home through the mystery of darkness towards the certainty of supper. I do this taking and driving because today my wife visits her psychiatrist. She visits the psychiatrist because I am unfaithful to her. I do not understand the connection, but there seems to be one.”
Updike was hardest on, and most forgiving of, his male characters. And his most poignant and human creation, his finest character, was Rabbit Angstrom. Through four decades, almost in real time, we sink into the life of a man who sells cars at his father-in-law's Mazda dealership, falls in love with a prostitute, suffers the accidental drowning of his baby daughter, leaves his wife and then returns, gets rich, watches his children fail, partakes of a spouse swap on a trip to the Caribbean with three other couples, observes his son become a crack addict, and who, near the end of his life, sleeps with his daughter-in-law, Pru, finding that “her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness in the dimmed room is lovely much as those pear trees in blossom along that block in Brewer last month were lovely, all his it had seemed, a piece of paradise blundered upon, incredible.”
The first novel begins with Rabbit as a young man playing a game of pickup basketball with a few neighbourhood boys; and at the conclusion of the fourth, after a life of grasping and running, Rabbit plays one-on-one with a boy on the playing field “beyond the empty ochre high school.” He is aware “of his belly being slung up and down by the action and of a watery weariness entering into his knees.” There is the tarmac and the sky, and Rabbit, eternally caught between Earth and the angels, feels his torso ripped by pain and “Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds.”
Updike, in writing his poems and stories and novels, and thereby attempting to sidestep mortality, was forever gesturing at the torn clouds. He seemed aware that salvation does not arrive when sought out or bidden; that it was much more likely that paradise, like grace, was simply blundered upon.
