Tribute to John Updike

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Updike died on the 27th of January—aged 76—after a long struggle with lung cancer. Updike’s career, which spanned more than five decades and began with work for The New Yorker, comprised novels, short stories, poetry, essays, art and literary criticism, and one play.

Like many of his fictional characters, Updike was born and raised in Pennsylvannia, moving from Reading to Shillington, and then to Plowville. The small town life he experienced there became a template for his future writings, which often demonstrated the banality, repetition, and even anguish of suburban living.

Updike’s second novel, Rabbit, Run, became the first in a four-part series that earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and enduring recognition. The series bore witness to the strong social and political issues of the second half of the 20th century. In their pages the reader will find infidelity, the Vietnam war, AIDS, feminism, free love, liberalism, conservatism, and racism, as well as more deeply hidden themes—the decay of social values and of the middle class, the gradual loss of religious belief, the marginalization of industry and rebellion against the often pragmatic beliefs of the previous generation.

The series itself chronicles four decades in the life of his most famous character, Harry „Rabbit“ Angstrom, whose trials, triumphs, and failures are often indicative of the struggle and complicated nature of life experience. Most noteably the novels serve as an accurate portrayal of life, and their protagonist a harrowed and imperfect everyman who views the drastically changing world around him through his own lens of personal experience. In their completeness the novels create a blurring of distinctions—between right and wrong, good and bad. Through reading the novels Harry Angstrom’s problems become our problems, and through the language and pattern of his thoughts we begin to understand his opinions—even as they are often contradictory, cynical, and hypocritical.

Updike was fond of writing in series. Aside from the Rabbit novels, he also wrote three novels about a Jewish writer named Bech, whose fears that life may be meaningless have resounded, and some point in time, in the mind of many readers. The first of his Eastwick series, The Witches of Eastwick, was later made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher. His widely-read essays often had a quasi-philosophical simplicity, and focused in a sympathetic and almost existential bent on the world around him, and on his childhood. When he was not writing creatively he wrote reviews and criticisms for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Reviewing was not an occupation or a chore for him—rather, he expressed that he viewed it as an ongoing learning experience.

Aside from his two Pulitzer Prizes, Updike also received, among others, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Award, the O. Henry prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Medal of the Arts. The most enduring monument to his legacy will not be a laundry listing of much deserved awards, but his writing itself. The books of the Rabbit series ended with single-word sentences. In the case of Rabbit, Run¸ Updike gives us the the verb “Runs.” In Rabbit is Rich, while Rabbit sits in his chair holding his newly-born granddaughter, the narrator reflects “His.” These words were meant to be all-encompassing in a way, tiny little apotheoses for the novels’ events. But unlike them, the narrative of John Updike’s life is being written still, ongoing, as more and more readers are introduced to the enduring quality of his words, his understanding, his deep insight into the most sequestered and intimate process of human behavior.