John Updike 1932-2009

I have my Dad to thank for the fact that I've managed to read some Updike: a compendium of the Rabbit novels, plus the virtually cuboid reviews-and-essays collection Odd Jobs, are items on his shelves at home, and I ploughed through them all on some vacation past within the last ten years. As such, most of what I've read about Updike in terms of criticism (including the obituaries of the last two weeks) has felt quite familiar. Clearly a brilliant craftsman of mellifluous, well-minted prose; clearly a keen, shrewd, non-doctrinaire eye on American society and its politics; clearly someone who knew (or made it his business to learn) many useful things about the world, and incorporated them artfully into his fiction. And, clearly, someone much preoccupied with women and their most secret places...
Actually, strictly speaking, the first time I read anything of Updike's was by way of the extended extract from one of his lesser-known stories that is quoted, at length and admiringly, by Tim Madden, narrator of Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance. The extract in question is a paean to the poetry and mystery of the female groin, as you might say... I'm coming over bashful here, as Updike clearly never did. But when I think about Updike and my chief feelings about his work and its ambience, the one image that comes to me repeatedly is that of a working man of midlife vintage, looking discreetly but firmly at his neighbour's wife, and - if not entirely coveting her - then certainly giving her provisional marks out of ten, and imagining how he might go about verifying his estimate.
My wife and I were talking about the Updike obituaries in the car the other day, and she mentioned that there was a seeming consensus around the view that post-WWII British fiction had no novelist quite comparable to him. Interesting. Of course the thing with Updike is that he was very clear about his attachment to bourgeois subject matter that might seem overly domestic and common-coin to some sophisticates; and yet clearly he scrutinised it and poeticised it in a style far surpassing most writers' attainments in the same area. Britain, of course, has no end of bourgeois novelists passionately attached to that segment of the class system that best suits them. But the difference here is that Updike's protagonists tended to do regular jobs (often of the sort imagined to induce 'quiet desperation') rather than being, say, writers or academics, which is a depressingly regular occupation for the protagonists of British literary novels. Not that Updike was any sort of 'common man' or fixated on same; but he always seemed happy to have his hands dirty with the raw stuff of life, albeit in a highly elegant sort of a way...