James Wolcott on John Updike

Portrait of John Updike by David Levine

A special shout-out to James Wolcott for his brilliant, witty, perceptive “What you can get away with” in the February 19 London Review of Books. It’s a review of John Updike: A Life in Letters. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s a reconsideration of Updike’s life and work. Wolcott says, “Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him.” 

Reading that, I found myself getting annoyed. Updike is one of my heroes. He hasn’t fallen out of fashion or favour with me. But as Wolcott proceeds with his review, it becomes clear that he, too, is an admirer, subject to certain caveats. Of the letters, he says, 

It’s easy to peck and paw at the letters, that’s what these cockspurs are for, but there’s no belying the tremendous heft of this selection, amounting to an authoritative autobiography supplemented with photographs, chronology and an index that doesn’t skimp. It’s all here, Updike in full, and almost none of it has gone stale. An unbroken arc from boyhood to infirmity, the gravity’s rainbow of a life, career and mind.

Wolcott is excellent on Updike’s relationship with The New Yorker. He says, “The longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out’ – and ripened into one of the most inspiring matings of man and magazine in the annals of troubadour song.”

He says further, “Updike went on to become one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, his sentences nimble, airy and balletically turned out, his observational acuity on a whole other optical level, as if Eustace Tilley’s trademark monocle had conferred X-ray vision.”

The one aspect of Updike’s work that Wolcott deplores is Updike’s misogyny. He says, 

The reason Updike has fallen out of favour is more resistant to remedy. His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. 

Yes, I remember that Lockwood piece. What a bloodbath! Wolcott’s review provides a more positive, congenial view of Updike. Highly recommended. 

Postscript: See also Wolcott’s superb “Caretaker/Pallbearer” (London Review of Books, January 1, 2009), a review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick. Wolcott says that Updike’s eye and mind are “the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear.” This piece contains one of Wolcott’s most inspired lines: “America my have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.”