Patricia Lockwood on John Updike

John Updike (Photo by Brigette Lacombe)

I’ve just finished reading Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). What an extraordinary review! John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood savages him. Her first sentence warns of her intent:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.

It is a bloodbath. The piece is divided in seven sections. In the first section, Lockwood says,

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. 

That last sentence went straight into my personal anthology of great critical zingers. 

Section 1 also contains a striking metaphor – “Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity” – that shines a beam throughout the piece. (Subsequent sections on Rabbit Run and The Centaur each begin with the word “flash.”) 

In the second section, Lockwood analyses Updike’s youth – his relationship with his mother (“She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him”), the traumatic move from Shillington to the farm in Plowville [“The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer”]. 

Section 3 continues the examination of his life and then, at the mention of Rabbit Redux, turns bitingly sarcastic:

If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Section 4 is a wonderful capsule review of the first book of the Rabbit quartet – Rabbit, Run (“The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped, staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it”). Lockwood says of Updike’s writing, “When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning.” Of Rabbit, Run’s female characters, she comments,

He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday.

Section 5 considers Updike’s The Centaur (“The senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and weight of actual time”). Here, Lockwood conjures one of her most inspired descriptions, riffing on a line from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin: 

Winding through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives the car.

In section 6, Lockwood restates her argument:

After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable – the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.

Section 7 is the ugliest part, referring to “Updike’s homophobia,” “his racism,” his “misogyny,” “his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny, Jews are.’ ” But it also contains a remarkable passage – Lockwood imagining Updike reading what she’s written:

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

My response to Lockwood’s piece is shock. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open sixty-two posts that either discuss or quote his work. But here’s the rub: I’m allergic to fiction. The Updike I love isn’t the novelist and short story writer; the Updike I love is the author of Assorted Prose, Picked-Up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, Due Considerations, Higher Gossip, Just Looking, Still Looking, and Always Looking – collections of essays and reviews that, for me, are touchstones. Lockwood doesn’t consider any of these works. (Hugging the Shore is on her short list of Updike “delights.”) Her focus is on Updike’s fiction, particularly his four early novels – The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Run, The Centaur, and Of the Farm – and on the other Rabbit novels. 

Does her criticism of Updike’s novels apply to his critical writings? No, I don’t think so. Lockwood herself describes his criticism as “not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of other human beings, even to see into the minds of women.” 

One of Lockwood’s main contentions is that, after the early novels, there was a serious falling off in the quality of Updike’s fiction. She says, “Either way, some absolute angel lifts and moves on in the late 1960s.” I don’t think that applies to Updike’s criticism. The pieces in his posthumous collections Higher Gossip (2011) and Always Looking (2012) are every bit as strong and brilliant and delightful as the pieces in his first collection, Assorted Prose (1965).

If I were defending Updike’s fiction against Lockwood’s charges, I think I’d start with an observation Martin Amis makes in his recent The Rub of Time:

But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov – who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.