Painter of Surfaces

William Deresiewicz wants to preserve the stature of John Updike. In his TNR review of Adam Begley’s Updike, Deresiewicz contends that the current eclipse of Updike won’t last. For the moment, David Foster Wallace’s crack that Updike is a “penis with a thesaurus” will be the elite opinion, but Deresiewicz thinks Updike is “the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered.”

No one has to defend Updike’s skill as a writer, and he was surely a success, as Deresiewicz’s rapid-fire summary indicates: “Hired by The New Yorker practically straight out of college, as Adam Begley tells us in his new biography, he became a mainstay of its fiction section (and the best writer “The Talk of the Town” had ever seen) more or less immediately. From 1959 to 1971, he published The Poorhouse Fair, which won the Rosenthal Award; ?Rabbit, Run; The Centaur, which won the National Book Award; Of the Farm, a jewel of a novella; Couples, one of the signature novels of the late 1960s; Bech: A Book; and Rabbit Redux, which Begley justly calls his greatest work. He also wrote the lion’s share of the short fiction that, collected decades later in The Early Stories, prompted Lorrie Moore to remark that “it is quite possible that by dint of both quality and quantity,” Updike “is American literature’s greatest short-story ?writer.” In 1961, he published the first of some 375 book reviews for The New Yorker. In 1964, at the age of thirty-two, he was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and ?Letters, our American Pantheon.”

Get that? Inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters at 32!

Updike’s reputation suffers more because he was, in Deresiewicz’s words, “an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. . . . Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience.” That cannot be forgiven.

Nor can Updike’s theological conviction. In his story, “Pigeon Feathers,” the central character, a young boy named David, sees God’s hand in creation as he buries pigeons that he has shot. He becomes convinced that “the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let ?David live forever.” Creation bears marks of God’s design, that the goodness of creation argues, in Updike’s view, for life beyond death. God is the only savior, as Rabbit Angstrom says in Rabbit at Rest: “We’re all trash, really. Without God to lift us up and make us into angels we’re all trash.”

But it’s here that Deresiewicz’s defense doesn’t quite convince. God is there as an observer, as an all-seeing eye, but Updike’s God doesn’t judge: “He doesn’t judge Rabbit’s unbreakable narcissism, his inability to love anyone except himself, including his children. He doesn’t judge the couples in Couples, neglecting their own children. That he doesn’t judge has been the hardest thing for readers to accept, both then and now. But judgment clouds the eye.”

He’s right: That is hard to accept. A God who sees all, is present to all, but who refrains from intervening to prevent damage, or to rebuild after damage is done. A God reduced to spectator. A God who seems content to watch the dazzling surfaces of things. 

That is as much an aesthetic observation as a theological one, because Updike’s art has the same quality. He misses nothing, as Deresiewicz says. He retells all he sees in some of the most gorgeous English prose ever written. But he, like the non-judgmental God of his novels, stays on the surface. The surfaces enchant, but one is left wanting an insight that penetrates past the surface. Updike will be remembered as a chronicler of his times, but Deresiewicz doesn’t convince me that his novels have the depth to be of enduring importance.