I was a freshman in high school the first time I encountered the words of John Updike. I had a bad habit of reading in class rather than pay attention to what the teacher was saying, and so it went one day in English as I stumbled upon Updike's classic short story "A&P". I was transfixed from the beginning:In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.As the young teenager me read on, he recognized so much in the story: The passion and urgency of being a kid. The disserviceable desire to buck responsibilities in favor of looking cool. Standing up for something even if you're never sure what it is you're standing up for, even if you're standing up just to stand up. When Sammy makes his fatal heroic gesture, quitting his job to impress a girl only to find she didn't stick around to witness it, that she never shared the false intimacy he had invested so much in over a breif period of time, my heart sank and my brain applauded. Updike drew a picture of the complications of logic in the youthful mind unlike any author I'd previously read. I knew of Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Salinger from middle school English, and I loved them all, but this Updike guy was something else.
I went out and tried to find more Updike. To my dismay, "A&P" was an outlier of sorts for the man; he seemed more interested in crumbling marriages and societal pressures on middle class adults than he was in teenage angst. And here I was, an angsty teenager craving literature that would affirm my station in life, trying to wrap my head around Updike's rather heady prose about people like my parents. Not quite what I was expecting.
Still, I forced myself to read the man's work. I read "Rabbit, Run" and the rest of the "Rabbit" books. I read his short stories, and had a particular fondness for his "Bech" series. Eventually, I got deeper into his repoirtoire (and it is a deep repoirtoire indeed: Updike had a committment to publishing one book a year for his entire professional career, a challenge he nearly defeated), and found that maybe I could absorb a lot more than I thought. For in many stories, those same youthful passions Updike wrote about in "A&P" were still lingering in the minds of his adult characters.
He did reach outside the boundaries of Northeast suburbanite drama from time to time, though. In fact, I noticed he seemed to just write about what interested him at the time, almost as a lark. He wrote sci-fi and comedy if he felt so moved, and a book about a coven of divorcee witches that became a Jack Nicholson film. In his spare time, he crammed in respectable careers as an art critic and poet. And for that reason, John Updike is a hero to me. Not simply because he was prolific, or because he could write whatever he wanted and succeed wildly. He is my hero because he could do all of that, but also remain authentic and true to who he was while doing it. No matter what he was writing about, you knew it was Updike writing, because he was so precise and so telling. He had an unmistakeable voice. You trusted what he wrote, because you knew him, he put it all out on the page and you felt indebted to him for sharing things so revealing, even in his fiction. I felt so indebted, in fact, that after reading "Rabbit, Run" for the first time I had an urge to confess my sins to Updike, to let him know who I am truly and deeply the way he had spilled his soul to me.
(And there is an interesting dichotomy to think about: In my mind, Updike bled on the page, used his heart as an inkwell, confessing to us everything, and yet his words tended to be so spare, so precise, so perfectly chosen. He gave the reader everything using very little. He is a master.)
As a writer myself, I am tempted to align myself with the man. I want to see things we have in common, similarities between myself and the two-time Pulitzer winner. But I know I am not fit to share a professional field with Updike; I feel guilty knowing our names share common letters. He is a giant in my mind, one that cannot be toppled or even approached. Though I have yet to amass a body of work that can be compared numerably with Updike's, I know I will look back and compare myself to the man and wonder how I could have written more like him. And I think I'm OK with that, because coming in second or third or millionth behind Updike is an honor unto itself. I'm just happy I was ever running the same race as him.
Rest in peace, sir. You will be missed.
