Constant Reader

There’s always something ridiculous and over the top about attending
a Seattle Arts & Lectures event at Benaroya Hall. It could be that
all the pomp and circumstance around a book reading seems a bit much,
or perhaps the overkill feeling is, in part, thanks to the gigantic
twin Chihuly chandeliers in the lobby—sculptures that appear to
represent nothing so much as mutant sperm fighting vigorously to
impregnate a parsnip. Last Wednesday, November 12, was a more
ridiculous SAL pre-event vibe than usual. The hall had the impatient
energy of a stadium rock concert by someone like Springsteen: “I want
to get good seats,” a woman scolded her husband as they arrived and saw
the enormous crowd. “I want to get a good long look at him.”

The “him” in question is John Updike, a man who needs no
introduction, but who unfortunately (and in an unfortunate manner) was
introduced. SAL’s executive director, Linda Bowers, immediately drove
the proceedings over the cliff of stale literary-criticism terms. She
referred to Updike’s ability to capture “existential angst”
(pronounced, of course, ONGST) and “lyrical particularity,”
especially while reporting on the “staggering beauty of nature and of
art” and “giving the mundane its beautiful due.” One man in the crowd
shouted until his voice cracked—”WHOOOOO!”—when Updike
appeared, as though an in-their-prime Skynyrd had just deigned to play
“Free Bird.”

Lots of younger readers shit-talk Updike with the same tone of
unnecessary rebellion that teenagers have to put up against even the
most decent and loving of fathers. His writing
style—slathering beautiful sentences one atop the other until you have a complete, gorgeous work—is not currently in
vogue with the young literary mafia. But when you hear the man talk,
you realize this is who he is: Updike speaks in complete, punctuated
sentences, and every word is perfectly chosen.

He was interviewed by David Guterson, who confronted Updike with
about a dozen intensely researched and thoughtfully worded variations
on the old “Where do you get your ideas from?” question. “I know
there’s something wrong with someone who has written 60 books,” Updike
said of his body of work, but “the end is in sight” and it will
be “a relief to not work on novels” anymore. Thankfully, to celebrate
the Seattle Art Museum’s new Edward Hopper exhibition, Updike was also
interviewed by SAM curator of American art Patti Junker, who had the
good sense to put some enormous Hopper slides on a screen above the
stage and simply ask Updike to talk about them.

It was touching how this white-haired man, with his giant
reputation, looked so small and thin and frail and generally every bit
of his 76 years in his tailored gray suit, standing at the edge of the
stage with his back to the audience and looking up at the paintings.
“I can taste the dust in the plush,” he said of one painting,
and he remarked on the “wonderful Hopper silence” within the “box of
light” of another, and that “it is not Hopper’s way to say if” a woman
in the painting “is happy or unhappy.” By the end of the critiques, it
seemed as though there was nothing left in the hall but Updike’s
reassuring, measured voice and Hopper’s thick square pools of color. It
was worth all the crazy adulation for this singular experience: the
sound of an unparalleled intellect looking at a masterpiece and
precisely, and beautifully, describing exactly what he saw.