John Updike, 1932 – 2009
John Updike’s death at the age of 76 has brought a flood of reminiscences and tributes to the American literary giant.
The New Yorker has an impressive “Remembering Updike” collection with thoughts from fellow writers like Richard Ford, Paul Theroux, and T.C. Boyle.
The Guardian U.K.’s coverage features tributes from Jay Parini and Martin Amis, who describes Updike’s mastery of different literary forms:
He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems.
The New York Times obituary describes his “kaleidoscopically gifted” writing and discusses the themes of the four Rabbit novels that memorably traced the “questing life” of a middle-class American everyman.
An interesting assessment of his life and work at slate.com proclaims Updike “line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era.” The piece also notes that Updike’s practice of producing at least three pages a day resulted in his share of literary clunkers.
Last year Literary Review honored Updike with its lifetime achievement award for bad sex writing in fiction (the annual honorees excerpted here are excruciatingly entertaining as well).
Updike’s poetry is often overlooked amid the almost annual release of novels and his steady stream of magazine pieces and criticism. His poems describe everyday situations with humor and sharp observation, and I’m often reminded of one verse in particular on long, slow afternoons at the office:
Each hour seemed a rubber band
the preoccupied fingers of God
were stretching at His desk.
