I’M AT THE WORLD CUP AT PRESENT, podcasting — something which I don’t know if this newspaper has quite mentioned — and wouldn’t you know it: Penguin Modern Classics have announced a big new edition of the works of John Updike.
Isn’t it always the way? OK, I can’t say it’s led me to sell my England-Sweden ticket, but nonetheless I would like to have been at the launch. When the editor of this section wrote to tell me that this new edition was being published, she entitled the e-mail “John Updike”, and I thought, finally. After so many years of going on and on about the man — essentially scrawling the walls of literary London with a version of that 1960s Eric Clapton graffiti, “Updike is God” — I thought, he’s got in touch. A small beautifully worded thanks, maybe, or perhaps an invitation to lunch with him and Martha next time he comes to Hay. But no. So I suppose I’m going to have to go on more than ever about this new edition and see if that works.
Well, for those of you who still don’t know, Updike is the world’s greatest living novelist. He was the world’s greatest living novelist when Saul Bellow was alive, and he remains the world’s greatest living novelist despite the continuing breathing in and out of Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, and even Dan Brown. He also beats a lot of dead ones to become the greatest postwar novelist, and arguably the greatest novelist of the 20th century, once you put away your adolescent tastes and realise that Joyce was a bit of a sixth-former, Lawrence a silly sex fascist, and Proust unreadable except for people trying to show off.
Literary critics keen to play down Updike — mainly those upset by the deep focus on sex in his work — tend to try to write him off as a stylist, like football writers used to try to write off Joe Cole, pinning him as someone whose talent may be lovely to look at but remains essentially a frippery, a non-essential luxury. And it is true, of course, that Updike’s ear for beauty in language is unparallelled (Martin Amis once described his ability to pepper his pages with breathtaking simile and metaphor as “suspicious”) — off the top of my head, without the books to hand — the description in Roger’s Version of the feeling in the testicles after a night of sex as a “pearly ache”, the characterisation of tomatoes in The Witches of Eastwick as “of plants the most human
. . . eager and fragile and prone to rot”, the description in Couples of adults going home on Sunday night after a sunny afternoon playing basketball with their friends as facing the regular end-of-weekend realisation that they are “not the world’s guests, but its hosts.”
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But this is not just beauty; it is never, in Updike, sound without sense. Listen to the tomatoes line: there’s so much meaning in it. His beauty is all about saying so much, so economically.
Trying to pick the best lines of John Updike, however, is like trying to find the best fish in the ocean. The central force of his writing — the thing that gives the beauty its meaning — is its focus on the everyday: his project has always been, in his own words, “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. That is why there is so much sex in his work, because sex is at once the most mundane and the most beautiful of human actions. I have cried often reading his work, most I think at the death of Harry Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest. Throughout the novel, the mainly hospitalised Rabbit has been hanging on to a memory of meeting his lover Ruth under some pear trees in a hometown street. Having become convinced that one of the nurses is Ruth’s daughter, and therefore possibly his daughter, his sign-off to her is this: “ ‘Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we’ll meet another time.’ Under the pear trees, in paradise.”
There, in a nutshell, in the shift between what Rabbit says and thinks, is the movement — a constant oscillation as Updike sees it — between the mundane and the beautiful. This project springs from Updike’s understanding of God, his deep religious conviction that God is as present in cabbages, vaginas, golf and dentist’s chairs as he is in churches. I don’t believe in God, although I do sometimes when reading Updike. Make no mistake, we are living in the time of a master. He is up there with Dickens, with Austen — sod it, he’s up there with Shakespeare. The only person I can think of with more talent is Ronaldinho. Now can I have that lunch invitation?