John Updike

It is hard to imagine a world without John Updike. His writing career spans my own life as a reader of significant fiction. He came to national attention at about the time that I began to take fiction seriously, and ever since there have been novels, short stories, book reviews in The New Yorker, and essays on art, arriving with alarming frequency by this prolific writer.

Updike has a mixed reputation among critics, some of whom dismiss him as a popular writer. He won almost every significant prize or recognition for his fiction, yet he was not always taken seriously. The lead book reviewer for The New York Times, Michiko Kakatuni, wrote an appreciation of Updike which the paper placed prominently on its first page today. These words seem especially to sum up what Updike did so well in his fiction:

“It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.”

As the 21st century continues and the 20th century becomes more history than memory, I think people will perhaps read Updike to gain a sense of what the middle decades of the century were really like. In the meantime, I think we will miss him.