Build Your Own Canon: Thoughts On Updike

Updike has written so many books you can carve several writerly careers out of them. The Updike I hate is pretty much the Updike everybody hates. He is decimated beautifully by David Foster Wallace in Consider The Lobster and I don’t need to add to that. The Updike I love is the Updike David Foster Wallace loves: the writer of the early non-Rabbit works: of The Farm, the Centaur, The Poorhouse Fair, Assorted Prose, and what are now called The Early Stories.   I do have a couple of things to say about this Updike, who keeps being eclipsed.

It feels like there is some committee conducting interviews for a post called Great American Writer and that the Rabbit novels are Updike’s submission to this committee. What’s more depressing is that the committee seems impressed.   If you assigned Time magazine to write a novel, they would have come up with something like the Rabbit series.  The problem is that this kind of writing requires empathy and humor, neither of which Updike has in abundance.

The emotions he was put on earth to capture were not the robust emotions of Augie March but something else. Updike is the great writer of American nostalgia. I think of nostalgia as a kind of character defect, a choice to live in an idealized past rather than the real present.  But for Updike nostalgia is an exalted, complex emotion: it is the wistfulness which departing high school seniors feel for their home town; it is the tenderness which the dying feel for the world. I would suggest that, as the poignant underside of all our moving around, nostalgia is also a central emotion to most Americans. Although it is very worldly, Updike’s nostalgia is spiritual in that it is radiant and unconflicted, at least in the normal sense of conflict in fiction: the dissonance of our warped wants. I think the last two stories in Pigeon Feathers are his greatest realization of this vision of fiction, but I will quote Of The Farm:

At my mother’s insistence, we went to the shopping center. The garish abundance, the ubiquitous music, the surrealistic centrality of automobiles made me feel, emerging from my father’s dusty car, like a visitor from the dead. I remembered these acres as a city dump adorned with pungent low fires and rust-colored weeds. In the supermarket nothing smelled, because even the turnips were bagged in cellophane, and the air had the faintly sour coolness of plastic. The greed my mother exercised in the aisles with my money exasperated me. I burned to return to Peggy, fearing that by some cruel rerouting of time she would have aged or vanished and I would be left with nothing but this present, this grim echo of my mother and this lonely child impersonating me–how eager to please we are, setting out in life! –amid this acreage of brightly shoddy goods.

And what this means to me, as a writer, is that every writer is the cartographer of a particular place—partly geographic, partly emotional. It is the job of the writer to intuit this place and to realize that publishers, critics, and canonizers might not quite understand it.   

      

Comments

Lovely post, even for someone who has never read Updike. ;) There is a copy of one of the Rabbit books in the studio here. I was thinking of picking it up, but now I'll wait until I can get one of those earlier books.

[K]

Is this you, Mandy? I can usually tell by the IP if the comment comes through as unsigned but this one didn't line up with your previous comments. Still, I think I only know two people who might be in studios right now and Sari claims no internet access.

[Mandy]

Weird. Yep, 'tis I.

[minnesotaj]

KF,

Just wanted to say: this was a really great post. Top notch.

Plus, didn't know where else to slag you for adding the Haynes bio-pic to your "Enthusiasms." I thought it was incredibly tired: not half so weird as Masked & Anonymous and trying too hard to deliberately riff on the Pennebaker and Scorsese docs (while adding little actual riff). But maybe I should give it another try?

Of course, I liked the Rabbit novels, too--or at least the first two, which are as far as I got through that epic.

So maybe I'm just the weird man in this crowd?

[K]

I should check out the movies you mentioned. You'll also notice a new omnibus comments jar for just this sort of thing. I actually posted it at pretty much exactly the same time you posted your comment.