Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’.
That last word is strange. You might imagine that Updike sold novels in bulk, bought by the Main Street masses of whom he wrote. But Updike sold quite modestly in his lifetime — Couples was a major commercial success, earning him a place on the cover of Time in April 1968, but beyond that he struggled to crack the top 50 in America.
This led Tom Wolfe to characterise Updike’s criticism of his bestselling novels as envy. Wolfe responded to Updike’s view that A Man in Full was ‘entertainment not literature’ by remarking that Updike was ‘a pile of bones’ who couldn’t take a bestselling book seriously. Wolfe levelled similar accusations at Norman Mailer, and John Irving pitched in to defend Mailer and Updike saying: ‘you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king.’ Wolfe fired back by penning an essay titled ‘The Three Stooges’, which appeared in a collection called Hooking Up.
This 10-year feud is still turning heads in America. Kevin Frazier has written a very long piece on the subject in the online literary magazine, Bookslut. In it, he explains why Updike is enjoying a revival in America — a revival that seems to be spreading to Britain.
‘The answer isn’t hard to find. If The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full are designed for instant gratification, most of Updike’s novels have been designed for more gradual appreciation. Ideally, of course, a work of art should do both, should give us great pleasure at first glance and even greater pleasure on longer acquaintance… Updike wrote one proper bestseller, Couples, but most of his novels sold more modestly, and struggled to reach a shrinking audience. In Hooking Up, Wolfe implies that the great serious writers are also the great popular writers. But it’s never been that simple. Popular and unpopular works of good writing have always existed side by side, and the relationship between them is too unpredictable to reduce to any formula. Wolfe is right to say that popularity can be one sign of a novelist’s vitality and worth, but he’s wrong to say that Updike, of all people, is unpopular because he’s out of touch with the realities of American culture. The Rabbit novels are the most fully sustained and completely realized epic take on American life any of our writers has produced. Their author doesn’t need to be taught lessons by Wolfe on how to investigate and present the spectacle of our society in all its unwieldy, bewildering specificity. Updike’s writing not only fulfils but overflows the qualifications that Wolfe takes from Alfred Kazin as the mark of our greatest novelists: “our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.” There’s much more to Updike than the Rabbit novels, but Updike is a bigger subject for another time. He deserves to be discussed separately, and on his own terms rather than on Wolfe’s.’
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