Grab Bag

By Robbie on February 2, 2009

First, let me express my sadness at the death of America's great verbal visionary, John Updike.  Some of his writing (Rabbit, Run; Roger's Version; the Maples stories) opened crucial dimensions of worldly experience to me when I first came across it in the 1980s.  His unsparing anthropological gaze fell on on every brand of human behavioral tendency and warp: sexual, familial, mystical, political, lunatic. His characters grasped clumsily after pleasure and meaning; they were the opposite of tokens in cleverly plotted diversions, moving through their environment with as much determination and perplexment and dumb wonder as you and I do.  Inhuman nature, dazzling, brutal, and indifferent to our torments and desires, also fired his mind and pen.  Thus did his writing demonstrate, I believe, a certain courage, and a ferocious engagement with his time and place (just as his dedication to his three-page-a-day output manifested level-headed steadfastness).  In his exacting sentence work there is the faith that all that we want or need to express is there in the language, somewhere.  A false faith, no doubt, yet it comforts and inspires as much as the next faith, and more importantly, does not negate the portion of truth that is in these books, which is ample.  There are questions about his lavish style, his suspiciously ceaseless production, his celebrity, his attitude to women, and the quality of the fiction of his last fifteen or so years, but looking at the now-complete shelf of his literary achievement, it seems to me the most conservative assessment to say that this was one writer who carried out his contract with his readers and his craft spectacularly.

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