A decent job of assessing Updike's work by Ian McEwan in The Guardian today - it fails to do him justice, but at least McEwan acknowledges that.
Some good insights.
Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.
Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size". He was clear, too, that we all sense more than we can ever put into words, and was mindful of the example of Joyce and his "great attempt to capture the way we move through life".
And from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:
A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right. Describing the “Rabbit” books to a new reader, one is stunned to be reminded of their apparent inconsequence: the hero isn’t a great bootlegger who gets killed, or a boy on a raft with a runaway slave, or even a suicidal small-town gent or an exotic expatriate in Spain. He doesn’t do anything grand. He’s a high-school basketball star in a dying town; he runs a Toyota dealership; he has an affair or two with a woman; he stays married; he has a hopeless son. And yet Rabbit’s small acts hold not just truth but also glamour, a mystery and glow almost Proustian.
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I'm not a good enough writer to express how I feel about the work of John Updike, who died this week. I loved the audacity of this - a whole orchestra on stage! - and I loved the way that Stoppard integrates the orchestra into his play so effortlessly. It's playful, clever, funny and moving. Two confessions: I've never seen a zombie film (I switched off Shaun Of The Dead after about ten minutes) and I expected Dead Set by Charlie Brooker to be pretty rubbish (A zombie film? By a journalist? Set in the Big Brother house? Pah.) Amid all the tributes to Harold Pinter over the last week, this obituary in The Economist struck me as the most concise and insightful. |
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