Patricia Lockwood

lrb.co.uk/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

Patricia Lockwood

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’ by John
Updike
Library of America, 850 pp, £36.00, November 2018, ISBN 978 1 59853 581 5

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
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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.

No, I had not misremembered. After the patchwork stiltedness of his first published
novel, 1958’s The Poorhouse Fair, Updike unrolls himself over the landscape of his
boyhood like a vast horripilating skin. Hackles rise, pupils dilate, clean cold air crackles
into the lungs. Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up
section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity. A person who reads this
Library of America collection of his first four novels would get the idea that here is a
genius just getting started, and would embark on the rest of his work with excitement.
That is the way I began, with a greed that approached the physical. There must be more; I
would find it.

The more I read of him the more there was, like a fable. In the morning I might revisit an
early story like ‘Flight’ (1959), which sees the Updike stand-in Allen Dow referred to by his
father as ‘Young America’, and musing that ‘his mother’s genius was to give the people
closest to her mythic immensity. I was the phoenix.’ I would see Updike himself bristling
gold with fire and feathers, and I would admire the prose in its first-suit formality, and all
would be well. But in the afternoon it would fall to me to grapple with the absurdities of
‘Midpoint’ (1969), a long autobiographical poem containing observations like ‘mirrors are
vaginas’ and ‘penises are eyes,’ not to mention the following lines:

Our lovely green-clad mother spreads her legs –

Corrosive, hairy, rank – and, shameless, begs
For Pestilence to fuck her if he can,
For War to come, and come again, again.

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In the evening I might turn to the
overwrought adulterous rhapsodies of
Marry Me (1971), in which a man strokes a
woman’s arm and says, ‘No one’s ever told
you how cunty you are,’ and regret that
the sexual revolution ever came for him at
all. The project began to feel like a
flamboyant completist stunt, like one of
those Buzzfeed articles where someone
ranks every episode of the original Care
Bears cartoons. This is not the way his
work is ideally read. That would be over
the course of a lifetime, accompanied by
countless cups of coffee, by a man exactly his own age and with the same long clowning
lines and flared nostrils of a Quentin Blake drawing, smiles and cigarillos in a well-
defended study, a thatch of white hair. ‘New Updike,’ he might think, with a little uptick of
a tricky heart, as he came across a trifling piece in the New Yorker, a meatier story in
Playboy, a new novel every few years, all backgrounded by the same infusions of radio
and television and newsprint, the same social glosses in Life and Time. I am not such a
man. And so, nearly deranged by the time I had commando-crawled my way to the
1980s, I started making notes like ‘drink cold cum in hell’ and ‘i’m glad that god killed
you.’ I read on and on, waiting for him to become as good as he had been as a boy.

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
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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?

The sudden telescoping shift from the personal to the geological to the spheres that is so
typical of his writing is born from this black adolescent panic. He becomes capable of
expanding like a gas, flying us in an instant from an aching molar to the great groaning
mantle of earth to a crater on a moon of Mars. ‘As David ran, a grey planet rolled inches
behind his neck,’ he writes in ‘Pigeon Feathers’ (1962). Updike was brought up as a
Christian, he would continue as a Christian, pinned to belief by the question: ‘What
anchors any of us in our places, keeps us from flying off the face of the earth?’ All here,
on the patch of family land that plucked him out of the run of common people. Here too,
presumably, he experienced the turbo-puberty that would first exhilarate and later
exhaust his reading public.

But after these adolescent years a smoothness sets in, as if he is living the dream of a life
of a writer instead of an actual one. There is a departure for Harvard in 1950, and a
marriage while still at school to Mary Pennington, a fine arts major from Radcliffe. There
are a few years as a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he produces Talk of the Town
pieces with the same facility that he produced cartoons and poems for the Harvard
Lampoon. Nothing much happens, and what does happen is reliably transcribed into the
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work. He stutters and has psoriasis; his characters stutter and have psoriasis. While he is
married to Mary, the wives in his fiction march forth as his conception of her: self-
serious, clutching tight to the progressive politics she inherited from her Unitarian
minister father. When he begins to feel restless at the New Yorker and moves their young
family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, beach views and shingled houses and the irresistible
baby toes of neighbours’ wives begin to appear. The affair with Joyce Harrington in 1962
that nearly ended his marriage is so lightly fictionalised in Marry Me that it practically
floats: ‘You’re great. You’re a great blonde. When you get up, it’s like the flag being
raised. I want to pledge allegiance.’ When he and Mary finally divorce in 1976 and he
marries Martha Ruggles Bernhard soon after, Janice emerges in the next Rabbit book
totally changed: ‘I was married to another wife,’ Updike blithely explains in the
introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, ‘which may help account for Janice’s
lusty rejuvenation.’

‘Can I ask you something?’ I asked the members of my Updike Support Group one by
one. ‘Do you remember Rabbit Redux? Like, at all?’ What I really meant was: ‘Am I insane?’
Had I alone been entrusted with the burden of this book’s contents? Had we forgotten,
as a society, that the 1971 sequel to Rabbit, Run contains a scene of Rabbit reading The
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass out loud while a black man rapes a hippy girl who,
earlier, spent several pages speaking entirely in rhyme? Don’t worry: she likes it, and
then dies in a fire at the end.

Rabbit Redux finds Rabbit working as a printer alongside his father, the lobotomised
Janice so invigorated by an affair with a car salesman that she seems washed of all
memory of drowning her own daughter, as the year 1969 gathers to a blaze in the
background. Janice moves out in a cloud of pink self-actualisation, and Rabbit,
understandably, invites a barely legal flower child called Jill and a self-appointed black
Messiah called Skeeter to live with him. He doesn’t want to fuck Jill at first, but soon, like
magic, ‘small curdled puddles of his semen … appear on her skin, and though easily
wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her
throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body
being eventually covered with these invisible burns.’ If you were worried that somewhere
in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then
compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Rabbit Redux was once heralded as a masterpiece and the fulfilment of his promise –
most complexly by Anatole Broyard, who at the time was passing for white. (Updike’s
loving and thorough biographer Adam Begley offers the following hedge: ‘His judgment
is complicated by that experience but not necessarily invalidated; few critics can have
devoted more thought to what it means to be black in America.’ No further questions.)
Broyard reserves special praise for the characterisation of Skeeter, who ‘goes beyond the
familiar anger and rhetoric into the wild humour blacks no longer seem to allow
themselves’. In practical terms, this means that he spends a lot of time pumping Jill full of
drugs while looking like a lizard, and masturbating evilly to slave narratives with an arm
‘long as an eel, feeding’. ‘Daring to make a black man not just a villain but a would-be
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Antichrist; daring to stage the rape of a white girl by a black man; or simply daring to dip
into a black man’s point of view – in the morally strident 1960s, in the heyday of the Black
Power movement, Updike was taking a risk,’ Begley writes. ‘A load of coercive self-
righteousness (what today we would call political correctness),’ he adds, ‘could easily
have landed on Updike had Skeeter, and the graphic descriptions of Skeeter having sex
with Jill, been misconstrued.’

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.

Either way, some absolute angel lifts and moves on in the late 1960s. His biographer
assigns it to the assassination of JFK – sure, why not? It seems to occur at the same time
as Updike decides to turn from adolescent inwardness to history as it happens: the news
is now piped from radios and corner speakers, underscored by the political
conversations that flow between moustaches in bars, on golf courses, on used-car lots,
and that are eerily identical to the ones we’re still hearing. He grows up, in short, but not
into a real adult, just into a country club member. One of the men who run the world.
There are still delights to be had – the Bech books, the Maple stories, Hugging the Shore
(1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and Self-Consciousness (1985) – but by and large
something has flashed and is gone. In an essay on Dostoevsky, Updike speaks of ‘that
penetrating badness that casts doubt over even the peaks of an author’s
accomplishment’, though it is to be admitted that Dostoevsky is still Dostoevsky. Is
Updike still Updike?

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*

Flash. Rabbit, Run. The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped,
staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it. Harry
‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a 26-year-old ex-high-school basketball star with a wife called Janice
who is both pregnant and frequently day-drunk; ‘Just yesterday, it seems to him, she
stopped being pretty.’ His self-satisfaction requires him to take part in regular pick-up
games with current up-and-comers to assure him he’s still got it: ‘That his touch still lives
in his hands elates him.’ Rabbit, Run was conceived as a conservative answer to On the
Road, and in some ways Kerouac was a better model for Updike than the rarefied writers
he loved more: Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, Proust.

I don’t use teletype paper, but there isn’t an awful lot of revision when I’m writing –
things either grind to a halt or they keep on moving … Kerouac was right in emphasising
a certain flow, a certain ease. Wasn’t he saying, after all, what the Surrealists said? That if
you do it very fast without thinking, something will get in that wouldn’t ordinarily. I think
one tends to spoil not only the thing at hand, but the whole artform, by taking too much
thought, by trying to assert too much control.

Back and forth he goes on a court of pages, doing the drills, making the long liquid
stubborn muscles that will support him up to the end, that will automate certain
movements that began as holy gestures. Proprioceptive, bouncing his eyes around
corners, writing criss-crossing possibilities on the space. A span like an orangutan.
‘Naturals know. It’s all in how it feels.’

This is what Rabbit is: a carnal pleasure, something Updike has more than allowed
himself. In the end he will not deny his character anything. Rabbit flees from the stony
immovability of Janice and takes up with Ruth Leonard, a former prostitute, and I believe
that Updike’s reputation as a sex writer rests on a paragraph that comes during their first
sexual encounter:

When she has peeled off the stockings and tucked them, tidily rolled, into the crevice by
the footboard of the bed, she lies flat and arches her back to push off the garter belt and
pants. As swiftly, he bends his face into a small forest smelling of spice, where he is out
of all dimension, and where a tender entire woman seems an inch away, around a kind of
corner.

Later he will write lines like: ‘For their honeymoon breakfast he jerked off into the
scrambled eggs and they ate his fried jism with the rest.’ Later he will write a scene in
which Rabbit invests in gold during the gas shortage before banging Janice on a pile of
krugerrands. But for now – for now – he has written this. The whole interlude with Ruth
has a sunlit stillness. The world doesn’t dream of intruding, until he turns and asks her:
‘Were you really a hooer?’

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When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is
often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will
become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense
of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily
and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his
women. Janice is a grotesquerie with a watery drink in one hand and a face full of
television static; her emotional needs are presented as a gaping, hungry and above all
unseemly hole, surrounded by well-described hair. He paints and paints them, but the
proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s
upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday. In the
scene where Janice drunkenly drowns the baby, it wasn’t the character I felt pity for but
Updike, fumbling so clumsily to get inside her that in the end it’s his hands that get
slippery, drop the baby.

Flash. The Centaur. An ungainly hybrid that takes on strange beauty in motion. The
senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and
weight of actual time. Here is Wesley Updike, cast simultaneously as the gracious
centaur Chiron and the gloomy, hilarious, hypochondriacal high-school teacher George
Caldwell, half-myth and half-man like any father. His son, Peter, aged 15, is both
convinced of Caldwell’s immortality and fears his death. Because Peter wishes to be an
artist, and is experiencing the same awakening Updike experienced, the book is seen
through surreal endless eyes, like mythological cups into which the world is poured and
poured.

Updike is the little synaesthete of American literature, with a tab of acid on his tongue.
Close to the beginning, as Caldwell lectures a class on the Big Bang while the principal
listens in, we feel ourselves in the hot red centre of his image-maker: roiling chaos, free
association of matter into fantastic form. Trilobites break out of his speech and crawl
across the classroom; the disorder is stamping and fertile and frightening; the teacher
barely stops himself from saying the word ‘hell’.

The story is really Peter’s, of course. Not much happens – a lecture, a doctor’s
appointment, a car forever breaking down, a pulled tooth, a basketball game, an obituary
– but for all the freshness of his perceptions, he might be the first life form on earth,
climbing crystalline out of the slime. Updike is a master of that moment when the
elements of the physical world arrange themselves around you and suddenly: click! a
Polaroid of happiness. Peter, more than any of his other characters, is a bursting
scrapbook of these Polaroids. The life before him is a breath he is on the verge of taking:
‘I had fallen in love with the air, which I was able to seize in great thrilling condensations
within me that I labelled the Future.’

‘Cars, stoplights, twinkling shadows that were people, all merged for me in a visual
liquor.’ The shine on his surfaces made me think of that wonderful line in Pnin, about
how to paint a black sedan: ‘One way to do it might be by making the scenery penetrate
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the automobile.’ Pnin is a distinct spiritual ancestor to The Centaur: the sensitive artistic
child, the lumbering clownish teacher who would have carried us with him into
irreparable heartbreak if the bowl the boy had given him had broken, the pretty glass
bowl in its iridescent suds, after everyone had left the party. There is an abyss that opens
in the chest of the reader who believes the bowl has cracked that is not entirely healed
by the news that it is whole. Old age and frailty and death are in that chasm, and huge
yawning pity for the end of ourselves. The Centaur, too, takes place in that blackness,
that tenderness that Peter cherishes for his father, who allows the expensive leather
gloves Peter gave him for Christmas to be stolen by a hitchhiker, who on the final page
may die.

These characters are inside cities, rooms, America – just as they are inside the body of
God, which is a great skin of feeling without perimeter. As long as Updike’s protagonists
keep to that perimeter, they are protected, and the immensity that so terrified him on
the farm becomes their own. ‘As the sheets warmed, I enlarged to human size, and then,
as the dissolution of drowsiness crept towards me, a sensation, both vivid and numb, of
enormity entered my cells, and I seemed a giant who included in his fingernail all the
galaxies that are.’ Galaxies, hometowns, a ‘patch of Pennsylvania in 1947’. Winding
through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of
Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives
the car.

Despite the challenging hybrid canter of The Centaur, despite the pitch-perfect quartet of
family voices in the 1965 novella Of the Farm, it is Rabbit who remains Updike’s lasting
legacy. After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but
become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable –
the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work
on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-
wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men
argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the
presence of God.

They also take on the worst aspects of the problem novel, a form for which he was
temperamentally and politically but not creatively suited. Jill, his archetypal Wise Fuck
Child and recent graduate of High Kindergarten, is straight out of Go Ask Alice (1971), a
bestselling YA novel that was originally marketed as a real-life account of a teenager’s
descent into drug addiction. His drug writing is cop-level bad. Rabbit’s abject son, Nelson,
on whom one might choose to project all the pathologies of the Baby Boomer
generation, becomes a cocaine and crack addict, grows a rat-tail, and snorts an entire
assembly line of Toyotas, while whining lines like: ‘They call it candy. Mom, it’s no big
deal.’ And in the final book, breathtakingly, Rabbit bangs his own daughter-in-law while
recuperating from an angioplasty. (She comes twice – Lord knows how the female body
is tuned as quiveringly as a violin string to the fantasy of the father-in-law. They use a

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condom, in case Rabbit’s son has HIV.) You’re almost glad Updike drowned Becky instead
of letting her grow up, because you know Rabbit would have dedicated whole
paragraphs to her ass; in describing his granddaughter’s mouth in Rabbit at Rest, he
writes: ‘Some man some day will use that tongue.’ Awww, Grandpa!

It’s hard not to see the grinning American skull behind Rabbit’s happiness. He is the
recipient of some massive government programme so comprehensive that it plumped
him in every cell, and which it is the poverty of subsequent generations to be unable
even to imagine. ‘It gives him pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the
world’s wasting, to know that the earth is mortal too.’ These are dispatches from the days
when they could have still saved us, and the world.

‘Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer,’ Gore Vidal wrote in 1996, ‘I now
find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we
have the money, the credentials and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that
passes all understanding.’ Rabbit’s life, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, is a scene
of sinister American superabundance, like a Walmart that sells both diapers and high-
powered rifles; he glides among the people preaching the prosperity gospel of his own
body. ‘What saints have to have is energy,’ a character observes in ‘The Christian
Roommates’ (1964), and in Rabbit, Run itself, Rabbit tells Ruth quite simply: ‘I’m a saint. I
give people faith.’ Give people faith, make people write well.

Critics did have the high-flying hopes for him of the sort that read more like patriotism
than anything else. It wasn’t just that he showed such promise in the beginning, it was
that writing didn’t seem to cause him pain, and he seemed somehow able to love
everything he had ever done, though he might occasionally express gentle retrospective
regret over terminology or excess. Updike dresses Rabbit in an Uncle Sam costume and
marches him in a hometown parade; together, the two of them are the happiest fucking
country this world has ever seen. As he writes elsewhere,

Don’t read your reviews,

A*M*E*R*I*C*A:
you are the only land.

The quartet that begins so musically and irresistibly with the phrase ‘Boys are playing
basketball’ ends with Rabbit beating a black teenager at one-on-one just before suffering
a massive heart attack; he can make old-school shots, we’re told, that kids don’t even try
anymore. The teenager – a drug dealer, it’s implied – nervously retrieves his backpack
and abandons him. This is fiction that Reagan might read when he’s feeling sassy, closing
the book and switching off the lamp without his sleep being troubled at all. Updike, in
later interviews, maintained that Rabbit would have been an Obama voter. He may have
been, but we know who he would have voted for next.

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How am I to write about all of him, see him from every angle? It is helpful to visualise a
globe: here are deserts of incomprehension, and here glaciers of stopped sympathy, and
here a warm hometown seen right down to the brushstrokes. ‘It used to come floating
up with all seven continents showing,’ he writes as a wistful athlete in a story called ‘The
Slump’ (1968). When he is good, that’s what he is: the view of earth we recognise after
feeling ourselves shot to the moon. ‘Then something happens. It all blurs, the pitch sinks,
the light changes, I don’t know. It’s not caring enough, is what it probably is; it’s knowing
that none of it – the stadium, the averages – is really there, just you are there, and it’s not
enough.’ No, we are here too, and we are real.

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-

school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a
great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I
underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in
the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get
it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

A better question might be why nothing sticks to him. (A friend pointed out that he once
wrote a book called Not Cancelled Yet. Of course he did: he has a book called everything.)
He is remembered as a libertine when he might be remembered as a reactionary
conservative or even as a Christian – and the libertines of literature have a habit of being
allowed everything. Colm Tóibín, in a 2009 interview with Bookslut, expressed a belief
that Updike’s homophobia would eventually eat into his critical reputation. (‘Squinting,
Harry takes the offered hand in a brief shake and tries not to think of those little HIVs,
intricate as tiny spaceships, slithering off onto his palm and up his wrist and arm into the
sweat pores of his armpit and burrowing into his bloodstream there.’) The same could be
said of his racism or misogyny or his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny,
Jews are.’ But nothing of the sort has really happened. This may be because, beyond his
early work, he is not actually being read.

I suspect it also has something to do with his own body of criticism, which is not just
game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of
other human beings, even to see into the minds of women. If you were one of his
characters, you might be ugly in the morning, he might ask if you were ‘really a hooer’,
but if he were reviewing you he would read every word as one of the faithful. (God
forgive me, John Updike, I did not read Terrorist.) There is a story called ‘Archangel’ (1960)
that stands out as one of those cornucopic passages of the Bible, spilling beryls and
spinels and corundum. His criticism is the same: engaged in endless holiday production,
moving people in and out of itself like a party, what we used to call gay. He is pupilish
and professorial all at once, and his valuations are often correct to the penny. There’s a
reason he’s the definitive word on so many writers, the diamond glinting from the jacket.
It is all things good about him, until you get to the review of a book called Black Suicide,
say, and have to lay your head on your desk for approximately an hour, or find a passage
like this one:

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 My pussy alters by the time of day and according to the mesh of underpants. It has its
satellites: the whimsical line of hairs that ascend to my navel and into my tan, the kisses
of fur on the inside of my thighs, the lambent fuzz that ornaments the cleavage of my
fundament. Amber, ebony, auburn, bay, chestnut, cinnamon, hazel, fawn, snuff, henna,
bronze, platinum, peach, ash, flame and field mouse: these are but a few of the colours my
pussy is.

Well, I suppose that’s cornucopic too, in its way. One wishes not so much for an editor as
for a brutal anti-American waxer to swoop in.

At times it felt that each sentence carried me further from understanding him. At other
times it felt that I had never read anyone with such animal attention, all reflexes
relocated to the tip of my pen. It was like wrestling an angel with a massive erection, who
towards morning marks you in another way. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ may be the
punchline of the David Foster Wallace piece, but the quieter takeaway is that Wallace
was a fan. A failed em dash in one paragraph gives us the accidental line ‘beautiful
flashes of writing-deer,’ and before I understood, I thought: yes, that is what they are like.
Beautiful flashes of writing-deer. In the end Wallace loved the sinner, as Updike wanted
us to love Rabbit Angstrom. And part of the problem with our 360-degree view of
modern authors is knowing where to put any of it. Wallace’s vivisection of Updike’s
misogyny seems calm and cool and virtuous, and then you remember that to the best of
anyone’s knowledge Updike never tried to push a woman out of a moving car. ‘I cannot
greatly care what critics say of my work,’ he said. ‘If it is good, it will come to the surface
in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided
me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman’s intimate satisfactions.’

If he is a minor novelist with a major style, as Harold Bloom has it, then what is style? We
speak of it as superficial, as a gloss applied to plain surfaces, but a sheen can become
inherent, architectural, like the sheen on pigeon feathers. He hit blue heights in those
early years and his design is what carried him; I am not sure what was true of him then
that would later cease to be true. There is something very precious pressed in this
collection, and it is that edge-of-the-seat feeling that he’s just getting started, that it might
still happen differently, that he’ll never have reason to write the sentence, in his alter-ego
Henry Bech’s voice: ‘Writers are not scholars but athletes, who grow beerbellies after
thirty.’

A man, of about Updike’s age at his most fictionally offensive, came and sat on the park
bench next to mine as I read ‘Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car’ (1961)
and cried about David Kern helping the cat die; a packet of sugar fell from the man’s
pocket as he passed. He bellowed of business into his phone and then dropped it in his
lap and smiled at me. He was going to ask what I was reading, but my face forbade him –
we are less undefended now than in his day. Too bad. I could have told him that Lorrie
Moore once lingered so long over these pages that they gave her a papercut. It’s still a
good story, I ought to have said.

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‘Naturals know. It’s all in how it feels,’ Updike writes in Rabbit, Run. ‘It seemed silly for the
crowd to applaud or groan over what you had already felt in your fingers or arms as you
braced to shoot or for that matter even in your eyes.’ All right then, an athlete. He braced
and the shot went up, the one no one even tries any more. What he liked was the
movement of his own arm, which kept the present world going for a while like a
basketball. He was so sure it was going in; what we watched, the whole time, was his
sureness. No one was looking at the basket at all, not till the buzzer rang. Afterwards the
athlete thanked God, as before he had wept for the anthem, and was ushered off the
court with the name on his jersey glowing white in the darkness of his disappearance.
And a bad-natured ex-girlfriend sat high up in the bleachers, long after the lights had
been turned out, the words ‘Were you really a hooer?’ still ringing in her ears, though still
feeling a pleasure in having loved him, a pleasure in writing about him well.

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