John Updike must’ve known he was sick. In town to celebrate the
Edward Hopper exhibit at Seattle Art Museum, he looked tiny—a
matchstick with a bright white swab of cotton plopped on top—on
the enormous stage at Benaroya Hall, but he seemed healthy and
spry.
“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.
He made quite a few references to the impending close of his career
that night. At the time, it seemed like a morbid indulgence from an
author nearing 80 (almost a kind of humility, considering his work
will live as long as the language), and the audience laughed
politely. But lung cancer doesn’t just sneak up on you like that;
before our eyes, Updike was wrestling with a more corporeal concept of
mortality.
Death is not an uncommon theme in his writing: In the October 5,
1992, issue of the New Yorker, Updike published a story called
“Playing with Dynamite.” It’s a scorched-earth sketch about an old man
coming to terms with his mortality.
Living now in death’s immediate neighborhood, he was developing a
soldier’s jaunty indifference; if the bathtub in the corner of his eye
as he shaved were to take on the form of a polar bear and start
mauling him, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Even the end of
the world, strange to say, wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Young critics dismissed Updike for writing solely about white
Massachusetts men who cheat on their wives. But during his career,
Updike wrote from the point of view of a young Muslim terrorist, a
supermarket checker, a man in the distant future, supporting characters
in Hamlet, an exiled African president, and so many
more—enough characters to populate a good-sized American town, a
bedroom community where the melancholic postman might be getting it
on with an angry witch of a housewife, but the police chief is a
fundamentally decent man with a particular taste for ironies and great
artistic achievements. Most novelists born during Updike’s career
simply aren’t willing to write books that wander too far outside the
boundaries of their own experience.
Younger readers tend to resent Updike’s talent: He seems too
establishment for people who are continually told how alternative they
are. But anyone who appreciates good writing quickly learns to admire
Updike as a craftsman. His sentences are beautiful,
surprising things, and they represent a lot of work: That word
choice and phrasing and those complicated structures are not just
inspiration. There was a steady hand composing them, a hand that’s now,
finally, at rest. 