I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.
One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.) ‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.
In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad. There’s so much of him, spread over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike.
I began from a place of love, the charmed garden of his early novels, stories and critical essays. I read Rabbit, Run when I was 12 with a sense of accumulating speed and transport I have rarely felt since, though a confusion about what exactly Rabbit was doing to Janice’s ass in that fateful scene persisted into adulthood and probably did lasting damage. (Women! Let your husbands come on your ass extremely soon after you give birth or else you will drown your own baby!) I assumed he would continue in this general tradition, his landscapes delicately dotted with the dandelions of misogyny. I knew he had no idea how women pissed. Was I wrong about the rest? Had I misremembered certain splendours? It was possible. Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing. My antagonism toward the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them, is far milder than might be expected, and mostly takes the form of my wanting to wrestle them at sleepovers, slowly but inexorably, through the use of black magic, turning them into lumberjack lesbians. (...)
The plainness of his biography offers the consolations of the lumberyard: all that neatly stacked blond wood, a testament not just to his soundness and his industry, but to some rich green complacency in the valley that grew him. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1932 to Wesley and Linda Hoyer Updike. His parents, and grandparents, rocked him like a handmade cradle; in ‘Midpoint’ he calls himself the fifth point of their star. ‘I was made to feel that I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend never to lose it.’
The one reverberating trauma of his childhood seems to have been the family’s 1945 move from Shillington, where he spent the first 13 years of his life, to a farm in Plowville, after his mother made a command decision to buy the house where she had been born in 1904 and return them to a place she remembered as paradise. The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer. Linda, who possessed literary aspirations for both of them, and who published her own stories in the New Yorker after her son became a fixture there, had believed it would, and she was right, but he never really forgave her. It is his father’s teacherly portrait that is fixed with so much sympathy in the National Book Award-winning The Centaur, but it is his mother’s figure that walks the halls of his fiction, wearing through the floorboards in her rounds, casting illumination on the walls and ceilings. She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him. ‘He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close; when in fact between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough,’ he wrote in ‘A Sandstone Farmhouse’ (1990). In a fine late interview Barbara Probst Solomon asked him about his habit of painting women in his fiction, rather than inhabiting them. ‘I suppose I’m male enough to be more excited by the outsides of women than their insides,’ he began.
In a chronological reading, the serious lapse in form comes earlier – with Couples (1968), the novel that chronicled the adulterous whirlwind of the early Ipswich years and notoriously made Updike a million dollars. Perhaps I am more puritanical than I realised, because the mere thought of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the beginning of Rabbit, Run had spilled and seeped into the text. Dim, carpeted, brown, pressing our faces perpetually into the plaid of some couch. It is also the book in which Updike becomes 25 per cent more interested in feet, which is not something the world needed.
As I read I actually felt my teeth getting stronger, like a teenage dinosaur. I wanted to grab at the waist, wrench and kill – what? Some part of my own history, the story of my grandparents crawling home drunk after bridge games in the new suburban paradises my grandfather helped build, dressed in the loudest of loud checks. Updike’s reliably beautiful descriptions, always his strength far above dialogue, plot and characterisation, now betrayed my faith on every other page: how can a man who lights on the phrase ‘tulip sheen’ to describe the skin of a woman’s breast use a racial slur to describe another woman’s labia in the same book? Some cruelty in him moves to the forefront, as well as a burgeoning distaste for the politics of the counterculture whose sexual advances made it possible for him to write in extended milky detail about swingers breastfeeding one another in the bathroom.
[ed. 911? Hello. I'd like to report a murder. What an essay/retrospective by Ms Lockwood! This is how you do it.]
One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.) ‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.
In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad. There’s so much of him, spread over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike.I began from a place of love, the charmed garden of his early novels, stories and critical essays. I read Rabbit, Run when I was 12 with a sense of accumulating speed and transport I have rarely felt since, though a confusion about what exactly Rabbit was doing to Janice’s ass in that fateful scene persisted into adulthood and probably did lasting damage. (Women! Let your husbands come on your ass extremely soon after you give birth or else you will drown your own baby!) I assumed he would continue in this general tradition, his landscapes delicately dotted with the dandelions of misogyny. I knew he had no idea how women pissed. Was I wrong about the rest? Had I misremembered certain splendours? It was possible. Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing. My antagonism toward the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them, is far milder than might be expected, and mostly takes the form of my wanting to wrestle them at sleepovers, slowly but inexorably, through the use of black magic, turning them into lumberjack lesbians. (...)
The plainness of his biography offers the consolations of the lumberyard: all that neatly stacked blond wood, a testament not just to his soundness and his industry, but to some rich green complacency in the valley that grew him. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1932 to Wesley and Linda Hoyer Updike. His parents, and grandparents, rocked him like a handmade cradle; in ‘Midpoint’ he calls himself the fifth point of their star. ‘I was made to feel that I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend never to lose it.’
The one reverberating trauma of his childhood seems to have been the family’s 1945 move from Shillington, where he spent the first 13 years of his life, to a farm in Plowville, after his mother made a command decision to buy the house where she had been born in 1904 and return them to a place she remembered as paradise. The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer. Linda, who possessed literary aspirations for both of them, and who published her own stories in the New Yorker after her son became a fixture there, had believed it would, and she was right, but he never really forgave her. It is his father’s teacherly portrait that is fixed with so much sympathy in the National Book Award-winning The Centaur, but it is his mother’s figure that walks the halls of his fiction, wearing through the floorboards in her rounds, casting illumination on the walls and ceilings. She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him. ‘He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close; when in fact between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough,’ he wrote in ‘A Sandstone Farmhouse’ (1990). In a fine late interview Barbara Probst Solomon asked him about his habit of painting women in his fiction, rather than inhabiting them. ‘I suppose I’m male enough to be more excited by the outsides of women than their insides,’ he began.
I don’t know. My mother was a very eloquent woman who was constantly offering to share her thoughts with me, and maybe I got an overdose of female thought early. There’s a kind of a heat about female confidences, this tremendous female heat, and you sort of run backwards and try to find some guys to play a little softball with. But, oh, there’s this sense of women being almost too much, too wonderful, too sensitive, and yet somehow wounded – wounded I suppose by their disadvantage within the society.If I linger here, it is because this is the ground that gives us some of his best stories and most unusual perceptions. Here he was tormented by a sense of immensity that sometimes leaned down to peer at him through its microscope, or descended from a screaming height to chase him through the streets. He felt his smallness, a single squirm in an unbearable swarm. The slow-ticking clock on the wall took little bites of him, his eyes were bright with hayfever, his asthmatic lungs gasped for air. The halo of selfhood had descended: one minute it was wide enough to circle the globe, and the next minute it was tight enough to squeeze the breath out of him. What must he do – how must he underline and lift himself – to ensure that God did not ever let him die? (...)
In a chronological reading, the serious lapse in form comes earlier – with Couples (1968), the novel that chronicled the adulterous whirlwind of the early Ipswich years and notoriously made Updike a million dollars. Perhaps I am more puritanical than I realised, because the mere thought of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the beginning of Rabbit, Run had spilled and seeped into the text. Dim, carpeted, brown, pressing our faces perpetually into the plaid of some couch. It is also the book in which Updike becomes 25 per cent more interested in feet, which is not something the world needed.
As I read I actually felt my teeth getting stronger, like a teenage dinosaur. I wanted to grab at the waist, wrench and kill – what? Some part of my own history, the story of my grandparents crawling home drunk after bridge games in the new suburban paradises my grandfather helped build, dressed in the loudest of loud checks. Updike’s reliably beautiful descriptions, always his strength far above dialogue, plot and characterisation, now betrayed my faith on every other page: how can a man who lights on the phrase ‘tulip sheen’ to describe the skin of a woman’s breast use a racial slur to describe another woman’s labia in the same book? Some cruelty in him moves to the forefront, as well as a burgeoning distaste for the politics of the counterculture whose sexual advances made it possible for him to write in extended milky detail about swingers breastfeeding one another in the bathroom.
by Patricia Lockwood, LRB | Read more:
Image: Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe[ed. 911? Hello. I'd like to report a murder. What an essay/retrospective by Ms Lockwood! This is how you do it.]
