Morning:
8°c
IT IS possible for an author simply to write too much. Fluent wasn't the word for John Updike. He published some 25 novels, a dozen collections of short stories and six huge volumes of assorted prose. Few of even his most appreciative readers can claim to know all his work - and his most recent books were far below the level of his best, often re-working familiar themes with a tint of sourness, even, some thought, of misogyny.
Updike will be remembered for his earlier work, such as his classic New Yorker short stories and the wonderful Rabbit series. In his best fiction, Updike's extraordinary eloquence illuminated common experiences of quite ordinary characters - as though to show us we can never do justice to the richness of everyday life unless we see it as a sequence of marvels and epiphanies. He wanted "to give the mundane its beautiful due", as he put it.
Updike believed in the sheer power of description, the joy of turning the world into shapely, pleasure-giving sentences. Every writer must? But Updike took it further than anyone, sometimes to excess. Martin Amis once went so far as to call him "a psychotic Santa of volubility".
It was true that his unfailing expertise could become glib and allocated inappropriately in his fiction. Harold Bloom woundingly called him " a minor novelist with a major style".
For all his devotion to honouring small-town life, Updike's dominant theme was sex - seen from a distinctly male perspective. His literary imagination, which didn't alter much over a long career, was formed in that final era of sexual repression in the early Fifties.
When sexual liberation arrived in the Sixties, Updike was there to chronicle it with all the fervour of one for whom such freedoms never ceased to seem astonishing. He bestows upon specific sexual acts almost sacramental attention, as though they alone might fend off the sense of transience, ageing and mortality which religion could not combat. In his ground-breaking 1968 novel of intersecting adulteries, Couples, he made small-town infidelity seem nothing less than an epic endeavour. But as Updike and his protagonists aged, this sexual insistence became almost parodic, as he lecherously itemized "female bodies with their supple heft, their powdered and perfumed auras", and so forth, adjectives always flowing. It was not for nothing that Updike received the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement award last year, in its own way, no less merited than his Pulitzers.
Never mind. He will be read and relished for a long time, both because he observed and itemized the America of his time more minutely and lovingly than any other novelist and for the sheer pleasure of being in the hands of such an adroit and polished stylist.
