"I don't think Updike minded being called a writer of the surface. Some of the nicest parts of life are on the surface.
"What Updike did was more like peeling an onion. What's in the center of an onion? Nothing. You've exhausted the onion once you've exhausted its surface. But that doesn't mean we want to throw the onion out of our diets and eat unflavored food."
Updike's preoccupation with the physical world might well have cost him the Nobel Prize. Last October, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel jury, sneered at American writers as "insular and isolated." Unlike their European counterparts, Engdahl said, Americans don't write about deep moral issues, "and that ignorance is constraining."
It probably didn't help that Updike thumbed his nose at the Nobel academy by awarding the literary world's top honor to another of his characters, the womanizing Jewish-American novelist Henry Bech. In a short story called "Bech and the Bounty of Sweden," Updike satirizes the entire process, down to the acceptance speech.
But if critics were ambivalent about Updike, the public adored him. Updike had a rabbit's proclivity, publishing nearly a book a year for 50 years. He not only wrote novels and short stories, but poems, a play and critical essays.
"It's amazing how many of his books remain in print," Klinkowitz says. "If you walk into a bookstore, you may find three or four by Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, but there will be 15 by Updike."
If the critics failed to give Updike his due, it may have been because they confused the superficial with the trivial. To say that a book's pleasures are to be found in a detailed depiction of a little boy's neck gleaming "like one more clean object in the kitchen among the cups and plates and chromium knobs and aluminum cake-making receptacles on shelves scalloped with glossy oilcloth" is not at all the same thing as saying that neck, and that kitchen, have no meaning.
The only way we have of knowing the world is through our five senses. Every deep thought, every moral insight that human beings have ever devised is, at its roots, a reaction to a specific physical phenomenon. To read Updike is to expand, however temporarily, our own powers of perception. Sounds are sharper. Metaphors spring more readily to mind.
John Updike made his readers larger people. He enhanced our capacities. And, what could matter more, what could be a more profound gift, than that?
Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler never met Updike, though they shared the same publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and the same extraordinary editor, Judith Jones.
Nonetheless, Tyler says in an e-mail: "I had a real sense of shock and loss when I heard he'd died. John Updike's writing was so intensely detailed, I always felt that I was living his life alongside him while I was reading him. Now that he's dead, a part of me half expects to be living through that experience with him as well. Can you imagine what a vivid report he could send us from the afterlife?"
If only he would.
