R.I.P. John Updike

[blp]

He's just died.

[Virgil]

I saw that John Updike passed away today. A sad day if you ask me. While I can't say I was a huge fan, he did have a certain style that was clearly him and he did engage the themes of contemporary life and truely his prose was as among the best. He was incredibly prolific and I reveared his opinion on what was good literature and why. The point of view of his criticism was a mixture of literary critic and writer, and I always appreciate when a writer talks from a writer's point of view. I enjoyed watching interviews with him as well. Here's an obit for The New York Times:


John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary, Is Dead at 76

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: January 27, 2009
John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike died at a hospice outside Boston.

Of Mr. Updike’s 61 books, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public as those about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. His best-known protagonist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the sad life of this undistinguished middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.

“My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

From his earliest short stories, set in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he once described as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid,” Mr. Updike sought the clash of extremes in everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce. The only wealth he bestowed on his subjects lay in the richness of his descriptive language, the detailed fineness of which won him comparisons with painters like Vermeer and Andrew Wyeth.

This detail was often so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction — those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that he wasted beautiful language on nothing. The latter position was perhaps most acutely defined by James Wood in an essay, “John Updike’s Complacent God,” in his collection “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (Random House, 1999).
[SNIP] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28updike.html?hp

In his memory I'm going to post an electronic version of one of his short stories, "A&P". It's very short and a good read. For those that may not know, "A&P" is an American supermarket chain of stores.
http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/

Now you can hear an interview with the author himself discussing his short story. It's in two parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlD6DmWBU4o&feature=related
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF1uHNxpp70&feature=related

Now we also had read his novel Rabbit, Run as a Book Club read and discussed it here: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27955

RIP.

[Mopey Droney]

Didn't know he had cancer. Anyway, his novels were a mixed bag at best, sometimes excellent (most of Rabbit) sometimes comically bad (The Coup), but at least until the mid-70s he was one of the most consistently excellent postwar short story writers in America, up there with Cheever for sure. After Rabbit at Rest his fiction really dropped off, I think because he knew he was so detached from society that it killed his inspiration, rather than firing it up. He certainly remained an excellent critic and essayist though, to his death. RIP.

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

Terrible. I did respect him as a writer and as someone with good taste.

[mono]

Indeed, I just read the awful news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7854554.stm) this afternoon, when I returned home from work.
R.I.P. John Updike.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45418000/jpg/_45418974_006791727-1.jpg

[Zee.]

I really enjoyed Rabbit, Run

[Bumbeli]

Makes me quite sad to see that another of the few remaining great writers has left the building.
I didn't read a lot of his work, mostly short stories, it's kinda hard to get my hands on any of his work in english, except for "Terrorist", which I'm not interessted in at all. Those Rabbit books have been on my "to read list" for quite some time now, I might finally read one or two of them now.
Was quite shocked yesterday when I read it, didn't know he had cancer.
Sad day for literature

[kelby_lake]

Poor Updike...and Pinter's dead...

[Niamh]

Updike is dead! :eek: Its seems that were are being deprived of modern legends these last few months. I'm sorry to hear he too has died from cancer. May his spirit be at peace and harmony.

[bronterre]

The odd thing about James Wood's consistently hostile reviews of Updike's work is how well Wood's criticisms applied to Wood himself - what more apt description could you want of Wood's style than "lyric kitsch"? Read more about it here:

http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/

[Virgil]

Another retrospective, this time from The Wall Street Journal:


John Updike, Literary High Priest of Sex and Suburbia, Is Dead at 76

By BROOKE ALLEN
Way back in 1997, the novelist David Foster Wallace publicly gloated over the senescence and impending demise of John Updike, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth -- "the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction," pre-eminent chroniclers of "probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Panning Updike's latest novel, "Toward the End of Time," Wallace castigated the grand old man as a "Champion Literary Phallocrat" and asked whether this could finally be the end for the magnificent narcissists.

Mr. Wallace was speaking too soon, as the subsequent decade was to prove. He himself, a suicide in 2008, would predecease both Messrs. Roth and Updike. Mr. Mailer died in 2007, hailed as a national treasure despite his lousy last novel. Mr. Roth continues to turn out excellent work at regular intervals and has been accorded the unique honor of having his collected works published by the Library of America during his lifetime. And the unsinkable, unquenchable, infinitely various John Updike would produce six more quite respectable novels, a novella, two short story collections, a book of poetry, and three volumes of essays and criticism between Mr. Wallace's 1997 diatribe and Mr. Updike's death yesterday at the age of 76.

Mr. Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pa. His early novels like "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959) and "The Centaur" (1963) dealt with that small-town milieu; later, after moving to Ipswich, Mass., he targeted the middle-class suburb. In many of his marvelous novels of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s -- "Couples," "Marry Me," "The Witches of Eastwick," and most of all the "Rabbit" books -- Mr. Updike spoke as the high priest of the sexual revolution, with all its concomitant adulteries and divorces and self-indulgence. When these things happen, the children suffer, and part of the hostility Mr. Wallace and other Gen-X literati have felt for Mr. Updike can be ascribed to standard resentment of sons toward fathers. Mr. Updike didn't set out to glorify such goings-on: Unlike D.H. Lawrence, he was no Priest of Love. And while his prose has seldom been equaled in its ability to convey erotic passion, he was equally adept at calling forth the self-disgust following on sexual abandon -- the hangover, the guilt, the searching emptiness. [SNIP] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310882480022677.html

And there is a link to an old interview The journal had with Updike:


Below, is an interview that Mr. Updike gave the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in 2005, shortly before the publication of his second collection of art criticism, "Still Looking: Essays on American Art."

The Wall Street Journal: Do you feel that the modern novel places too much emphasis on style and form and not enough on storytelling?

Mr. Updike: I can't tell them apart. In my case you imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form. As to style, you find words that will deliver the image without stopping the action entirely. Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction. [SNIP]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123308129733320473.html

Interesting read.

[Riesa]

He's dead, Jim.

[Virgil]

He's dead, Jim.

Is that from Star Trek? :alien:

[Riesa]

Is that from Star Trek? :alien:

originally.