John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. Updike died of lung cancer in 2009.

Contents 1 Early life, education, and early writing 2 Career, novels, and stories 3 Poetry 4 Literary criticism and art criticism 5 Critical evaluation and style 6 Themes 7 References

Early life, education, and early writing

John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to author Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and Wesley Russell Updike, a high school science teacher. John Updike was raised at 117 Philadelphia Avenue (now part of Route 724) in Shillington, Pennsylvania, until he was 13, when his family moved to a sandstone farmhouse in Plowville, Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he became interested in reading and writing. Shillington retained its importance for him; in his memoir Self Consciousness, he wrote "The first mystery that confronts is 'Why me?' The next is 'Why here?' Shillington was my here." More isolated in the country, Updike "commenced an adolescence marked by solitude and familial tension"; his mother "inculcated in him a conviction that he was marked for greatness. Perhaps just as important, she also introduced him to the New Yorker magazine, which quickly became for young Updike the symbol of all his most fervent aspirations." Like his mother, Updike suffered from psoriasis, and connected it to his abilities as a writer. In Self Consciousness, he links his "skin's embarrassing overproduction" to his creativity.

Updike later recalled seeing his mother writing at her desk and feeling inspired. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk," her son later said. "I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in -- and come back in."

These early years in Berks County would shape the environment of the Rabbit tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. He graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950. Updike later attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he "immediately established himself as a major talent of indefatigable energy, submitting a steady stream of articles and drawings for the Harvard Lampoon," which he served as president, before graduating summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English. After graduation, he decided to pursue a career in graphic arts and attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist. To Oxford he brought his wife, Mary E. Pennington, an art student from Radcliffe College. Updike, his wife, and their first daughter Elizabeth moved to New York City; Updike became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, but stayed only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories. In New York, Updike "[composed] the remarkable poems and stories that filled such early books as The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958) and The Same Door: Short Stories (1959). Stylistically, his early stories were directly influenced by the New Yorker itself." This early work reflected the influence of JD Salinger ("A&P"), John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"), and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.

At this time, Updike also underwent a spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of faith, he "turned to the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the German Christian theologian Karl Barth, both of whom decisively shaped both his spiritual beliefs and his artistic vision, which, in Updike’s case, are intricately linked." Updike more or less remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.

Later, Updike moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts. It was alleged by many, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was, in fact, Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s are contained in a letter to the same paper published shortly following Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award. Rabbit, Run featured Rabbit Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically examined character. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.

Career, novels, and stories

Updike wrote a sequel to Rabbit, Run in 1971 called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's confusion and ambivalence towards the social and political upheaval that beset the United States at that time. 1980 saw another sequel, Rabbit is Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, all three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership"; Updike found it difficult to close the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited. In 1990, Updike published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which saw the death of the poignant character. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella Rabbit Remembered in his collection Licks of Love, drawing a final close to the Rabbit saga. In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom, for which Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit’s eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."

After his early "Olinger" period, set in the Pennsylvania of his youth, ended around 1965 with the highly lyrical Of the Farm, Updike became most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery." He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." The most prominent of Updike's novel of this vein is Couples (1968), a famous and notorious novel about adultery in a small Massachusetts town which garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time with the headline "The Adulterous Society." Updike himself was divorced in 1974; his four children, including the future fiction writer David Updike, stayed with his ex-wife. The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflect the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage -- Separating (1974) and Here Come the Maples (1976) related to Updike's divorce. Those stories became the basis for the television movie Too Far To Go which was broadcast on NBC. Two other novels from this period, A Month of Sundays (1975), the first in Updike's so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, and Marry Me: A Romance (1976), are also meditations on suburban adultery.

He strayed from his typical settings in 1978, shortly after his second marriage to Martha Bernhard (1977) to whom he stayed married until his death in 2009, with The Coup, a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a trip he made to Africa some years earlier. After writing Rabbit is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island, which he described as an attempt "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors." One of Updike's most popular novels, it became a famous film and was included in The Western Canon (1994) of Harold Bloom. Updike in 2008 published The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel. Another unconventional novel came in 1986, called Roger's Version, the second volume of the Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program; Martin Amis called it a "near-masterpiece." The novel S. (1989), focused uncharacteristically on a female protagonist, concluded the retelling of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit Angstrom novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter-ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled into The Complete Henry Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is seen as a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.

After the publication of the Pulitzer-winning Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels more experimental in "style and approach." These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the art-tinged experimentalism of Seek My Face (2002). In the midst of these, he wrote a more conventional novel, called In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), an historical saga spanning many generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is seen as the most successful novel of Updike's late career and it has been predicted that the novel "may well emerge as the sort of late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation." In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His twenty-second novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a fervent, eighteen-year-old extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention.

In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. At over 800 pages long with over one hundred stories, it has been called "perhaps Updike’s most important achievement," functioning "as a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman – that is, a novel of education and development – in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce." It won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. Even this volume excluded several others of his short-story collections.

Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most but not all of which is compiled in Collected Poems: 1953-1993, 1993), essays (collected in about nine separate collections), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and memoir (Self Consciousness, 1989).

Updike won a wide array of awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts and 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement; the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the US government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was entitled "The Clarity of Things: What is American about American Art."

He lived with his wife Martha in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He died at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Poetry

Updike published around eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his very first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in their March 16, 2009 issue. Many of Updike's poems up until the mid-1990s were compiled by Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch wrote that because Updike "enjoys such pre-eminence as a novelist...his poetry could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; instead it "is a poetry of civility—in its epigrammatical lucidity...and in its tone of vulgar bonhomie and good appetite." His poetry "encompasses a variety of forms and topics. He has been praised for his wit and precision, and for his ability to focus on common subjects and on places near and distant." The British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for his "ability to make the ordinary seem strange, as all metaphysical poets have always done" and calls Updike one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry. He finds that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself", and is full of subtle "sound effects." The critic John Keenan, who praised the "beautiful and poignant" Endpoint, writes:

I find it odd that Updike's reputation as a poet is slight at best. The fact that he wrote about the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him. His poetry is dismissed as light verse, as if obscurity is an achievement and transparency a vice. It is the same snobbery which dismisses Larkin and Betjeman and fails to see their fundamental importance – what Clive James called, in another context, "playful seriousness."

Literary criticism and art criticism

In addition to his novels, poetry, and short stories, Updike was also a prominent critic of literature and art, frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. He once laid out his personal rules for literary criticism, in the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose:

Updike delivering the 2008 Jefferson Lecture.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.…

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never...try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th century authors," typically in The New Yorker, always with an eye to make his reviews "animated." He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike often "meant something" in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews gave "huge boosts to the careers, for example, of Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer." Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy too, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review to Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.

His literary criticism has been praised for its conventional simplicity and profundity:

Updike is what those in academe would, with no small disdain, call an old-fashioned appreciative critic, an aestheticist, a subjectivist. Shorn of the withering tone, this is a very fair assessment of Updike the critic, one that is pejorative only if we disallow that this kind of criticism holds an interest for the intelligent reader. Updike’s best work is informed less by fiat and declaration than by demonstration. Rather than worrying out loud over the state of literary criticism, he shows a commitment to it through practice.

Updike's art criticism often appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he frequently wrote about American art. Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?, dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th century. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence," is characterized by insecurity as compared with the artistic tradition of Europe." In Updike's own words:

Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that “for the poet there are no ideas but in things.” No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principle study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.

Critical evaluation and style

Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. Along with Toni Morrison, he was the most written about living American novelist of his time. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters," with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is near-universally acknowledged, even by those critics who are skeptical of Updike's significance as a novelist and of his larger artistic vision. Critics emphasize "his inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language, drawing comparisons to the prose of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov." Some critics consider him "fluent to a fault," others "question the depth and seriousness of his concerns" due to the supposed floweriness of his language, and some "[object] to Updike's portrayal of women, viewed by some as specious and misogynistic." Others more positively "suggest that Updike's employment of a dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader." Ultimately John Updike "remains highly esteemed as a foremost man of letters whose prodigious intelligence, verbal prowess, and shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life separate him from the ranks of his contemporaries."

His character Rabbit Angstrom, widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, joining Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like." A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maple stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.

Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean," and that Updike's death marked the "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument," and describing it, concluded:

Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size".

Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest (1990) "one of the very few modern novels in English (Bellow's Herzog is another) that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft...It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."

In a widely-read essay, David Foster Wallace called Updike "both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Wallace claimed "to admire the sheer gorgeousness of [Updike's] descriptive prose" and called The Poorhouse Fair (1959), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) "all great books, maybe classics." But he criticized Updike's "protagonists who are basically all the same guy" and the "Great Male Narcissism" of his writing. Wallace ultimately concluded that Updike's fiction falls prey to a "radical self-absorption," as evidenced by the Updikean protagonists:

The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.

The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote that "John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."

The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey." In a review of Updike's Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons," but there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview." Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract." He writes that Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and notes that Updike's unique style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence's subject. The beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of that language floats above reality, according to Wood:

For some time now Updike’s language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life’s gallant, battered ongoingness’, indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike’s language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan notes that Updike is "intensely intellectual," with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues." Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer." According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child." Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:

Updike’s sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust’s sentences in Updike’s description, they "seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.

Harold Bloom, the famous critic, once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist...He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987.

On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if he were given the chance to review Updike's Rabbit is Rich (1981). He replied:

The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated...John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is -- the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.

The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each one jokingly representing signs of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world," like Nabokov before him. But, in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, there is a caveat to Updike's place in the "literary pantheon":

But...I don't know anyone personally who thought of Updike as a vital writer. I don't mean that to say that Updike is somehow stiff, stultifying; he's the opposite to an unwholesome degree. What I mean is that I know several people who swear by Blood Meridian, Gravity's Rainbow, Goodbye, Columbus, even my personal pet peeve White Noise. These books cracked open lives, made people into readers. With the exception of our own Goodman Carter, who spent his pubescent years reading the Rabbit books obsessively, I don't know of anyone who says the same thing about Updike, or who even recommends his books beyond the Rabbit stuff.

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing." He praises Updike's style, his significance as an American writer, and the integrity of his vision:

A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right. Updike’s great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful. Unlike his European contemporaries, who saw the same space and the attempted filling as mere aridity and deprivation, Updike was close enough to, and fond enough of, the source of postwar material abundance to love it fully, and for itself. (And he knew enough of the decade of deprivation that preceded the big blossoming never to be jaded about plenty.) He viewed the material culture of American life with a benign, appreciative ironic eye. But he had no illusions, either, about its ability to cover the failure or wish away mortality.

Gore Vidal professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer." He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form." He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose." Vidal mockingly refers to Updike as "our good child," in reference to his wide establishment acclaim, and excoriates his alleged political conservatism. Vidal's ultimate conclusion is that

Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up. In this most delicate of times, Updike has "builded" his own small, crude altar in order to propitiate or to invoke "the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword."

Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer...and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review of Books, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery :

The elegant and penetrating descriptions, however, composed from the chasm's edge—both the wisdom and the wise unknowingness—are among the main reasons one reads Updike. "Her gesture as she tips the dregs of white wine into a potted geranium seems infinite, like one of Vermeer's moments frozen in an eternal light from the left." His eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way.

In November 2008 the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature."

Themes

The principal themes seen in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would weave them together. For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960). Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books -- the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories -- demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself is a kind of "Kierkegaardian 'Knight of Faith.'"

Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:

His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.

Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family."

Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity as ZZ Packer elucidates:

There seemed to me not many American novelists who were working so steadfastly in such riveting contradictions; both the patrician and the suburban, both sexual dynamism and sexual dysfunction, the commercial and the divine. There seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic.

The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed as, according to Julian Barnes, "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life." But as Updike saw a certain gorgeousness in everyday America, he also saw its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America." The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel The Widows of Eastwick (2008), notes that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits:

Heavy on mortality, light on morbidity, Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.

A caricature of John Updike from New York Review of Books cartoonist David Levine.

Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief...And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next," demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work. For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "...But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell is afraid of his cancer and has no faith. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence." Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife," and indeed "many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech’s concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû’s lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God — looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'" Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem Perfection Wasted (1990):

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market -

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That's it; no one;

imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike’s aesthetic comes in his early memoir The Dogwood Tree" (1962):

I reasoned thus: just as the paper is the basis for the marks upon it, might not events be contingent upon a never expressed (because featureless) ground? Is the true marvel of Sunday skaters the pattern of their pirouettes or the fact that they are silently upheld? Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm.

In the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2004), Updike described his purpose in writing prose:

Not only were the boxes useful for storing little things like foreign coins and cufflinks, but the caustic aura of cigars discouraged visitors. I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had become to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due.

References

Wikipedia