“Updike, After the Hush”

In case you missed the garden of obituaries that have sprung up after the death of John Updike last week, or in case you dozed off amidst their wafting accolades, Joseph Bottum writes about ” Updike, After the Hush ” on Forbes today. Here’s a taste:

“His writing was so delicate,” the critics whispered to one another, with that sad almost-smile of funeral-home reminiscence. “So graceful,” they agreed, in poignant murmurs. “So perfect, so poised”—as though John Updike had been a gentlewoman of old family and long widowhood, devoted to painting teacups and doing good works among the poor of the parish. As though he had been pressed with lavender between the fragile pages of his books.

It was all enough to make you want to break a window for air. Or spike the punchbowl. Or scramble up to the top of his tasteful bier and howl for a parade of circus freaks, drunken roustabouts and angry whores. Did all those tribute-writers never actually read the horrific drowning scene in Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run ? Did they not actually remember just how staggering is his “Pigeon Feathers,” one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century?
. . .

In his proper world, Updike could do character—one of the last American novelists still capable of it. The ex-high-school basketball-star Rabbit, trying to outrun life, is perfect in the way characters in Victorian novels are perfect: We remember him, as a person, after we’ve set the book down.

What’s more, the Rabbit books are well plotted. And they come to serious and surprising conclusions about the human situation in the American middle class. That’s worth something, isn’t it? Worth more, anyway, than the dismissal implicit in the graceful, delicate responses to the death of John Updike by most of the nation’s critics—all those unctuous obituaries and all those oleaginous tears.