On Updike

Online bookish discourse about John Updike, such as on this subreddit, is dominated by two overlapping narratives:

* Updike the narcissistic midcentury misogynist. In David Foster Wallace's famous words, a "penis with a thesaurus."

* Updike the parochial chronicler of New England WASP adultery, with nothing to offer the modern reader.

I'd like to problematize this reductive discourse by looking at Updike's oeuvre more holistically.

One glance at Updike's bibliography will tell you that he wrote much more than fiction about New Englanders having affairs. Even if he didn't, I don't think that that's a good critique of his writing. No serious reader dismisses Jane Austen's novels as being merely about courtship among the bourgeoisie and minor landed gentry in rural Regency England; we all agree that she was able to find the human condition within that milieu. Like Austen, or like Joyce -- who never wrote a novel or story set outside of his native Ireland -- Updike used his native milieu to explore universal themes, in his case the massive sociocultural shifts in postwar America and especially American masculinity and his discontents. (Let's not forget that Rabbit, Run began as what we would now call a feminist critique of Kerouac, as a book about the damage men do to their families when they privilege their own desires over everything else.)

But Updike was also a poet, also a literary critic, also an art critic, also an essayist, also a sportswriter. If you ever read one of those big hardcover collections of Updike's nonfiction, you'll find an incredible range of aesthetic and intellectual engagement: from Proust to Peanuts, from a celebration of Ted Williams at the plate to the first American book reviews to champion the fiction of RK Narayan. If you're American, there's a very good chance that a handful of books in your library have back cover blurbs by Updike; he was a generous critic, very willing to praise authors well outside of his supposedly parochial little world.

His very last book, published posthumously, is the poetry cycle Endpoint, a confrontation with his own old age, sickness and mortality.

Updike, in other words, contained multitudes, and a dismissal of his work based on reading one novel and finding Rabbit Angstrom unlikeable does a disservice to an expansive, multifaceted body of work.