Remembering John Updike

An amazingly gifted storyteller died last week. John Updike, a prolific and extremely popular chronicler of every day middle-class suburban drama, succumb to lung cancer last Tuesday. He was 76.

Updike was best-known for his series of four novels and a novella about the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. He was first published in 1950 and, by most accounts, kept a busy and varied writing schedule up until his death.

Updike wrote more than 50 books, including short-stories, poetry and essays, and reaped the gamut of nearly every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.

Updike found much to write about in the seemingly pedestrian lives of all of us, through his wide-eyed curiosity and peripheral observations.

"I've always had, I think, even before I began to publish, this notion that the ordinary middle-class life was enough to write about, that there was enough drama, interest, relevance, importance, poetry and poetry in it", Updike once noted. "I didn't need to write historical epics, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality (to do so). So I was stuck from my own limits, really, with middle-class life, or the mundane, let's call it, and so I was just trying to, story by story, encapsulate some aspect of life as I was experiencing it or observing it."

And encapsulate, he did.

Updike was a brilliant writer of masterful prose. He was, at times, accused of being a bit "poetic" and mellow-dramatic with his scribe, which is critical rubbish not deserved. Not many fictional writers were (or are) as earnest, raw and "gritty" real about our march through life. The way Updike weaved a clever narrative with sharp dialogue reminded me of a lighter version of Richard Yates. The glaring distinction was Updike earned an immensely steady adoration (mostly) of critical acclaim, while Yates endured with the encumbering weight of being the "writers writer".

John Updike was uniquely skilled at helping the reader along, with an assumed mutual promise that humility and redemption would come in the end, a welcoming comfort of his stories' silver lining;

A Rescue, by John Updike

Today I wrote some words that will see print. Maybe they will last forever and that someone will read them there, ink making a light scratch on his mind or hers.

I think back with greater satisfaction upon a yellow bird, a gold finch that had flown into the garden shed and could not get out, battering its wings on the deceptive light of the dusty, warped, shut window.

Without much reflection for once, I stepped to where its panicked heart was making commotion, the flared wings drumming, and with clumsy, soft hands pinned it against a pane, held loosely cupped this agitated essence of the air, and through the open door released it like a self-flung ball to all that lovely, perishing outdoors.

Rabbit run, old boy. You will be missed.