The Afterlife

The first semester of college was a disaster.  Dorms were auctioned off in a lottery, and my number was so high, there was no hope I would get one, so I lived in a seedy motel for the first two weeks of classes.  I finally found an apartment in the basement of an old Victorian house in the hills on the north side of town, a little over a mile from campus.  It was a nice place, but I was isolated, an 18-year-old who didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it.  Complicating all of this was my major: I had enrolled as a mechanical engineering major, but I wanted to switch to English as soon as I could.  In the meantime, I was barely enduring the engineering courses.

My landlord had been a comparative literature major, and he had a huge collection of old paperback books, many of which he kept in a closet in my apartment.  He seemed to like mid-century modernism, and the closet overflowed with Cheever, Barth, and Updike.  I had read “A&P” in high school, and I liked that story a lot, so I pulled out Rabbit, Run one day when I did not want to do any more homework for my engineering graphics class.  I went on to read several other Updike novels, including The Centaur, and there was something I couldn’t quite define that captivated me.

The books saved me, though, from despair.  I was alone and lonely.  I didn’t have any friends in the engineering program.  I was 250 miles away from my girlfriend.  I once went two entire weeks without having any occasion to speak to another human being.  It is not stretching the truth to say that Updike soon became something more than another author to me.  He became a family member.

A year or so later, I was safely enrolled in English classes, one of which was a creative writing class.  We had an assignment where we all came up with an opening line for a short story.  We voted to select one of the lines, and then we all had to craft a short story around that opening line.  The was this: “People get the darkest tan right around their armpits.”  I wrote my story and was very pleased with the results.  The professor made copies (mimeographs, even) and the whole class read it.  One of the girls in the class said it reminded her of Updike’s “A&P.”  This remains the highlight of my writing career–a comparison to Updike’s short story!

I have continued to read Updike since then, and some novels–Roger’s Version, the Rabbit novels, and The Witches of Eastwick–have demanded multiple readings.  The strange thing about my relationship with Updike’s writing is I have never met another person who likes his writing.  Not one.  “Stuffy.”  “Effeminate.”  “Rambling.”  “Prissy.”  I’ve heard many words of condemnation, and they have left me feeling hot and scratchy with indignation and frustrated outrage.  I never could seem to muster up the courage to defend my author in the face of such implacable, insistent, and smugly positive criticism.

For me, Updike’s prose has always been crystalline, sharp and hard-edged.  He managed to induce fits of jealousy in me with his keen ability to find precisely the perfect phrase to capture a moment, an idea, a picture.  The things that we see every day but do not know quite how to describe unless we ramble on incoherently for pages Updike can nail in one well-turned phrase.  Some critics hated his attention to mundane details, and torched him for wasting his elegant, eloquent phrases on things like the irritation of a rough spot on your thumbnail, but the poetry of the minutia always made me smile.

When I heard today that Updike had died in hospice of lung cancer, I felt blindsided.  I was expecting to read his new novels for another decade at least.  I lost an old friend.

EDIT:  Here is a great essay in Salon by David Lipsky that says what I was trying to say but says it better.  He says this about David Foster Wallace’s charge that Updike is a narcissist:  “But to call Updike a narcissist (and this charge has gotten around) misses the point, since the impulse behind his self-examination is so basically generous:  Our smallest encounters and realignments of feeling are worthy of inspection; if Updike’s life is a story, everybody’s is.”   Exactly.