rigorousintuition.ca

Well, I liked him.

Never read the Rabbit books, but Roger's Version and In the Beauty of the Lilies are favourites. The latter, especially:

Four generations. A great-grandfather [Clarence] who loses his faith and finds in the ''sorcery'' of the movies brief respite from ''the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God's withdrawal''; a grandfather whose life consists of ''guarded refusals,'' who retreats from both religion and ''American reality'' into a doting marriage; a mother who seeks, and mainly finds, in movie-stardom what others had previously sought in religion -- transcendence, higher reality, immortality, resurrections.

Then comes the son, Clark, in and for whom religion, the movies and the nature of American reality make a grim compact. Clark shares the first four letters of his name with his great-grandfather, and when, after a neglected childhood, druggy growing up and botched career in movie production, he turns to religion, we might be tempted to conclude that Clark was bringing the family history full circle. We might be further tempted when Clark, on his first night at a Colorado commune known as the Temple, brushes his teeth with baking soda -- which long ago had been Clarence's habit too. But circles are rarely full in life, and Clark's orbit is lower and more degraded than his great-grandfather's. Clark's American reality has had holes blown in it by drugs, while his movie saturation is such that the cinema rather than life has become his primary reference ground: every memory is an ''inner movie,'' and at one point he can only make visual sense of a girl if he thinks of her as ''looking like Sissy Spacek used to.''

But the religion that appears to save Clark from corrupted reality is corrupt itself: the Temple houses a crazy survivalist-Adventist sect that stockpiles guns while waiting for ''the Reckoning.'' These ''heroic believers,'' as Mr. Updike ironically terms them, are fueled by paranoia, spiritual elitism and a self-glorying death wish: they are also ultimately competitive -- and therefore authentically American -- in their belief that only 144,000 souls will make it into heaven on the day of the Reckoning.

...

This is a novel that acknowledges with Clarence (via Einstein) that in this century ''the universe is getting stranger,'' but declines to endorse the all-American story of innocence and its loss.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/l ... ilies.html

I like him too. The Rabbit books just get better and better. Or maybe they get worse and then better. I'm not sure. Rabbit is Rich is a great book, is what I'm saying.

RIP

R.I.P. I always liked him too, though it's years since I've read anything by him.

- Has anyone here read Nicholson Baker's U & I? It's a very strange, short, funny book, about John Updike and "the anxiety of influence". As somebody said, it is excruciatingly sincere.

Book Jacket Copy:

Few writers have trained an eye on the microscopic particulars of daily life to as much critical acclaim as Nicholson Baker, the author of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. But in this stylishly written, extravagantly funny book, Baker takes on a subject his own size - John Updike, his loomingly present literary influence and idol. Never mind that he has read only a scattering of Updike's books and has met the author only twice. Out of memory and speculation, admiration, envy, and anxiety, Baker has constructed a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination - a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers.

http://j-walk.com/nbaker/uandi.htm

MacCruiskeen wrote:- Has anyone here read Nicholson Baker's U & I? It's a very strange, short, funny book, about John Updike and "the anxiety of influence". As somebody said, it is excruciatingly sincere.

Haven't read that, but now I've read that I understand better The Onion's "Did I Say That, Or Did John Updike?"

And speaking of Nicholson Baker, I loved the self-aware foolishness and excess of The Fermata.

Jeff wrote: I loved the self-aware foolishness and excess of The Fermata.

Yes, that was the first of his I read, and I think it's still my favourite. I remember gasping out loud (while reading it on a crowded subway train) at the bit where he attempts to enter the Fermata by running a needle and thread through the hard skin on his finger and attaching the thread to some kind of a spinning wheel... It's described in such manically pedantic hyperexact detail that, for a moment, you actually start to believe that it might be a factual report.

At the LRB website, each one of the 21 essay-titles below is a clickable link:

John Updike, 1932-2009
‘Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draughtsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and the American plenty.’ James Wolcott in the LRB, 1 January 2009

21 essays from the LRB on John Updike

Graham Hough: Problems · Robert Taubman: Rabbit is Rich · John Sutherland: Bech is Back · James Atlas: Hugging the Shore · Nicholas Spice: The Witches of Eastwick · Christopher Reid: Facing Nature · Nicholas Spice: Roger’s Version · John Bayley: Trust Me · John Lanchester: S. A Novel · Frank Kermode: Self-Consciousness · Craig Raine: Just Looking: Essays on Art · Edward Pearce: Rabbit at Rest · Michael Wood: Memories of the Ford Administration · James Wood: Collected Poems 1953-1993 · Frank Kermode: In the Beauty of the Lilies · Ian Hamilton: Golf Dreams and Toward the End of Time · Frank Kermode: Beck at Bay · James Wood: Licks of Love · Thomas Karshan: Villages · Thomas Jones: Terrorist · James Wolcott: The Widows of Eastwick

http://www.lrb.co.uk/

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.