Cast Aside: John Updike's posthumous reputation

John Updike, speaking in 2005, four years before his death: “Reputations do subside, is one of the conclusions I’ve drawn. Your life as a famous writer, like your life as a human being, is limited, and now that we all live so long, a lot of us live to see ourselves become faded reputations. I don’t know if that’s true of me or not – I try not to think about it too much.” The subtext’s pretty transparent; even then Updike knew his reputation, at least as a novelist, was waning.

“Updike is not, I think, a great writer” – this is the falsely hesitant verdict of James Wood, a critic whose judgments are for the most part the kind you can take to the bank. Updike’s “a prose writer of great beauty,” wrote Wood, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.” Which isn’t really all that different from the two quotes always thrown around in assessments of Updike: he’s “a minor novelist with a major style” (Harold Bloom), and he “describes to no purpose” (Gore Vidal). With varying degrees of severity, all are saying pretty much the same thing: the man can turn out a sentence, but we’re going to need a lot more than that if he wants to go down in literary history.

A lot depends on how much value one places on sentence-by-sentence beauty. For Updike, beauty’s the blood by which his corpus is animated; his stated aim after all was “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” We’re not talking the odd bit of puffy lyricism here, though; we’re talking sentences and paragraphs and pages of sublime fidelity to the actual. Without the room to quote at length, it’s impossible to do his style justice, but surely any writer who’s able to write lines like “Her neck and shoulders are given a faint, shifting lambency by their coat of fine white hairs, invisible except where the grain lies with the light,” or, “Pop is asleep in his chair, his breathing a distant sad sea, touching shore and retreating, touching shore and retreating,” or “in the dark shelter of trees a sandstone farmhouse glistens like a sugar cube soaked in tea” – and to write like this with page-after-page consistency – is surely on his way to greatness.

When Wood asks whether such beauty is ‘enough,’ though, he’s not saying that Updike is nothing but some sort of unthinking automaton dispensing finely wrought sentences, but that everything beside his style is finally lacking. This, it’s fair to say, is no fringe theory. See for example David Foster Wallace’s voice-of-a-generation review of Toward the End of Time, in which Updike, after receiving the usual nod to the “sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose,” is savaged for what many contemporary readers see as his two defining characteristics: narcissism and misogyny.

The misogyny’s undeniable; the sad truth is that, if it alone were to merit Updike’s oblivion, we’d have to disregard many if not most great male writers. The narcissism, though, is another matter altogether. What’s usually meant is that Updike (in DFW’s words) “has for decades now been constructing protagonists who are all basically the same guy… and who are all clearly stand-ins for Updike himself… They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England… [are] unhappily married or divorced… roughly Updike’s age… [and] think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way Updike does.” Which may seem all well and good, but where does that leave us with, say, Proust, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, or The Book of Disquiet, or Journey to the End of the Night? And when it comes to Updike’s peers, what would we do with, e.g., practically every word written by Roth, James Salter, or Bellow (incidentally, Wood’s favourite writer)?

To label Updike a misogynistic narcissist and leave it at is surely to miss the point. Was Proust a longwinded snob? Joyce a drunken lech? Céline a crazed anti-Semite? Yes; but do such things really matter when it comes to judging their work on its own terms (even when such odious traits are shared by their characters)?

The novel’s a container of consciousness – the author’s. And when the consciousness, as in Updike’s case, is so great as to allow us to apprehend the world anew, to actually augment our reality – to really do this; to make us see the tea-soaked sugar cube in the shaded sandstone farmhouse – then perhaps we should put the faults to one side and say: yes, maybe this really is enough.