Why Updike was a spiritual failure

Monday, 9th February 2009

John Updike, who died two weeks ago, was certainly a great novelist; his books are intelligent without being clever-clever, and are highly readable. And he was the only major novelist of recent times who was interested in Protestant theology (a massive plus-point for me). So I ought to be a big fan, and for a while I was, but the more I read, the less sure I became. It perhaps sounds an unpleasant thing to say about a recently deceased person, but I see him as a spiritual failure.

His early books contained a serious theological agenda: to reflect on the abiding power of Christian faith, to dramatise the difficulty of relating to this cultural inheritance. And he ended up as just another secular liberal writer, who still deployed religious themes to add a bit of depth, and make the illicit sex a bit sexier, but had given up serious thought about religion. In other words he ended up mates with Ian McEwan.

From the very beginning of his career he fictionalized his own search for a viable form of Christian faith. He was steeped in liberal Protestantism, but found it a bit too flabby: he was attracted to the austere intensity of Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Religion can't just be a holy version of liberal humanism; it has to be dramatic, absolutist, a judgement on cosy modern hedonism. We need a strong form of faith to deliver us from the despair that lurks even in the suburbs. For over twenty years his main characters grappled with this pathos, while conducting extra-marital affairs. These men are torn between a sense of religious duty they can't quite make sense of, and the lure of sexual erring. It's great material, and produces some very good novels, from Rabbit, Run to Roger's Version.

The problem is that he doesn't move on. This territory becomes less sincerely occupied over the years; it is exploited for its aesthetic potential. Again and again, the thrill of sex is compared to a sense of religious awe. Updike sees that it is good for his art to occupy this borderland between religion and hedonism, and so stays there. His characters become increasingly detached from any acute interest in religion – and his nonfiction suggests that this mirrors his own situation. There are still references to God, of the sort that a Tory Anglican might make, to show what a well-rounded fellow he is, in touch with the depth of tradition, but passion's spent.

So my attitude to this writer is one of disappointment: he set out to explore the question of faith in a secular age, with psychological honesty rather than churchy cliché or academic waffle. And finding that he could write brilliantly about this half-way house of uneasy half-faith, he stayed there. In fact I think he was seduced by
aestheticism: the thrill of creating art about the religious quest eclipsed the quest itself. He could have become a great religious writer.

But he said some great things along the way, including this nice little anticipation of Dawkins: 'Among the repulsiveness of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.'