Goodbye to John Updike (1932 – 2009)

He was one of my favorite novelists, a person who wrote bracingly honest books about being male, being American, being human.

Now El Fotografo walks into my office and tells me John Updike is dead. Of lung cancer. I had no idea he smoked.

The obituaries are appearing now online, and I’ve snagged one below from Reuters.

I feel sad. I thought he had at least another 10 years of writing in him.

Updike became part of my life at around age 20, when I plunged into the Rabbit series for the first time. I was an Updike junkie from the word Go. It was his powers of observation that did it for me, along with his sympathies for ordinary, flawed human beings.

In the mid-1990s I attended a writer’s conference in Key West, where Updike gave a workshop on fiction writing and then a keynote address at a dinner. It was thrilling to be just a few feet from him, this man who sloughed off short stories and novels as easily as a snake sheds its skin (U. famously suffered from psoriasis).

Between the workshop and the evening dinner, I approached him to sign a copy of Rabbit At Rest. I told him how much I liked the Rabbit series and the Harry Angstrong/Rabbit character and he looked up, surprised.

“But you’re a woman,” he said, hinting at reviewers’ recent criticism that Rabbit is crass and sexist (he is). “And you like him?”

“Rabbit is real,” I answered.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Where do you live?”

“Miami.”

I could feel his hawkish eyes scanning me up and down. It made me deeply self conscious — about my pale skin, my red hair, so unlike that of most Miamians.

“My parents are from Pennsylvania, Easton area,” I added, feeling a need to explain myself.

“Ah. That’s why.”

The encounter was strangely like that scene in Rabbit Is Rich when a young woman enters Rabbit’s Toyota dealership in Brewer, PA, and Rabbit, mesmerized by her creamy skin, is reminded of his old lover Ruth, after which it dawns on him that the young woman may be his illegitimate daughter from that affair.

Updike was visually scenting me out, to discover my origins, what I (as a reader) might be to him.

He signed my book, a faint smile on his face.

Here is the Reuters obit:

Rabbit is gone: writer John Updike dies

By Scott Malone
Reuters
Tuesday, January 27, 2009; 5:37 PM

BOSTON (Reuters) – John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning,” said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House. “He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for more than half a century, prolific in his writing of novels, short stories, essays and criticism.

Updike’s stories often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.

An early short story, “A&P,” chronicled an adolescent boy’s inner turmoil when three bikini-clad teenage girls appeared in the supermarket where he worked.

“It’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach,” Updike wrote, “and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.”

Updike’s frank focus on sex came before the profound changes in U.S. culture of the late 1960s lifted some of the taboo from the topic. His publisher rewrote portions of his second novel, “Rabbit, Run,” before its first printing out of fear of being charged with obscenity.

That novel introduced the fictional hero Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the subject of four Updike novels and a novella over four decades, which won him two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.

‘AMONG THE VERY BEST’

Updike was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his 28 novels.

More than 800 Updike stories, reviews, poems and articles were published in The New Yorker magazine from 1954 through 2008. Many American readers strongly associated Updike with that publication.

“Even though his literary career transcended any magazine — he was obviously among the very best writers in the world — he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

“He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him.”

William Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College who studied and knew Updike, said Updike stood out for his versatility — writing fiction, nonfiction and verse.

“He stands, for me, at the very top of the practice of being a man of letters,” Pritchard said. “Each activity was carried on with great intelligence and wit and love.”

‘MAKE EVERYTHING COUNT’

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine. After a year studying at Oxford, Updike moved to New York where he worked for two years on the New Yorker’s staff.

In 1957 he moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston, and later moved to nearby Beverly Farms.

A New England flavor features in Updike’s 1984 novel “The Witches of Eastwick,” set in a fictional Rhode Island town, which was made into a commercially successful 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson and Cher.

In a Reuters interview in 2005, he said his view of himself as a writer had changed in recent years as he produced an increasing volume of art and literary criticism and struggled with the short-story medium. When asked which genre he preferred, he paused.

“If I had been asked that 10 years ago I would have said short stories is where I feel most at home. I’m not sure I do feel totally at home any more, whether I have maybe written all my short stories,” he said.

He was candid about the need to get writing published:

“I’ve become much more of a book reviewer and an art reviewer for that matter than I ever planned to. At least there is a comfort when you sit down to write one of these that you’ll be sure that it will get printed and you’ll get paid for it. It’s not the case with a short story.”

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York, Editing by Jason Szep and Frances Kerry)