Remembering Updike

I first met the literary John Updike, as if there was another one, in freshman English, introduced by Dr. Jack Null, nemesis-mentor and professor of mythic erotica in modern American fiction. My friend Jack Janosik, from across the hall in Apple Hall, our dorm, was in my English class, so there is at least one witness to the madness. We read Updike, Walker Percy, and the Brothers Grimm, seen through the lens of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, darkly. What did we know, a bunch of kids sitting around a seminar table trying to get the right answer and meet girls, to the existential angst of Dr. Null. Kind of like Rabbit and many of Updike's protagonists.

Come to think of it, Rabbit Run was a perfect choice for our coming of age transition to college life, which we called freshman English. What archetypal images do we encounter in Harry Angstrom's desperately self-centered and lazy life? Write a precis. (What's a precis?) What Freudian symbols, puns and wordplay shed light on his characters: Harry's wife Janice Springer, their son and Harry's tormentor Nelson, his old coach Tothero, the old harsh-god minister, the young group-therapy minister, Rabbit's shadowy parents and sister? Play ball. Write a research paper. Jump through hoops, win approval. Make it with girls.

The record will show that fall quarter went okay but winter quarter was a disaster, live and learn; if you sleep through enough morning classes, you won't do very well, and a pathetic attempt to critically analyze The Stranger didn't help much. However, I did make some kind of connection with Updike through the sheer adolescent obtuseness of Rabbit Run, and years later devoured Rabbit Redux and the other sequels, Rabbit is Rich and the final sadly triumphant conclusion Rabbit at Rest, whose final scene stays with me to this day.

All the literary types catalog Updike as the chronicler of middle-class blah blah blah. And it's true, his novels are not so very highbrow, and they do reveal a certain earthy, mundane, unpretentious side of bourgeois American existence in the middle to late twentieth century. And the point of view is consistently male, consistently white, consistently nonrevolutionary, consistently of the flesh and of this world. Sorry, no Nobel for you, Jack. Sucks to be born in eastern Pennsylvania.

Updike made fun of all those suburban couples in Couples whose erotic attractions and repulsions and misunderstandings were more comedic than tragic, and at the same time he took them seriously. It made a young reader wonder about whether and how to be a couple. Other books, such as Bech: A Book, seemed more ironic and distanced, like he was writing with tongue firmly in cheek, and maybe that reflected both the aging novelist and the era.

Minor books like The Centaur, Memories of the Ford Administration, and The Poorhouse Fair didn't lodge in my mind as clearly, for whatever reason, and struck me more as experiments in writing in a certain genre. I bet Dr. Null would be able to shed some light on that, in between drags on his cigarette held precariously between long, thin fingers at the table in Satterfield Hall.