John Updike in 1955 / Photograph: Getty/Hulton Archive
John Updike was born three years into one financial panic and died roughly one year (depending how historians end up demarcating our current debacle) into another one. In between, he lived through the defining moments of the American twentieth century, but it’s rare in his works, among those I’ve read, to find the Big Drama looming in the background, coloring everything and everyone on the page. More often, the commonplace is allowed all the room it wants as he described the ordinary moments of life as if they, and not, say, the threat of being drafted to fight in World War II, were worthy of consideration.
I’ll admit right now that I haven’t read all of his books. But who has? In the Beauty of the Lilies, from 1996, is the most recent book of his that I own, and it lists 38 novels, poetry collections and short-story collections. Of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels, I’ve read two, and the Bech books, one. Still, more words of his have stayed with me than with many others, and it really does seem that a friendly presence just left the room.
No one wrote better first sentences than John Updike. That sentence is crucial in a novel, setting up a question in the reader’s mind that must be answered, and leads inexorably to the next sentence, as well as putting a plot in motion. Not only that, the sentence has to create a sense of place and create a space for the novel to play out in. Updike was a master at this.
“In those hot last days of the spring of 1910, on the spacious, elevated grounds of Belle Vista Castle in Paterson, New Jersy, a motion picture was being made.”—In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996
A bit overstuffed, maybe, but I want to know what that motion picture (not a mere movie) was.
“I have been happy at the Divinity School.”—Roger’s Version, 1986
And why are you now unhappy?
“Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American.”—A Month of Sundays, 1974
This is going to be good.
From that opening sentence, Updike could work a skein, build a yarn, whatever you want to call it, that flowed downward like sugared milk and honey, always familiar enough to be recognizable, but unpredictable enough to hold your attention, working its way backwards and forwards such that the reader, entranced by now, was held captive and no more unable to stop reading than you, upon reaching its end, are able to recall how this sentence began. If it wasn’t so rich and packed with so much, I’d almost call it Mozartean, but that word calls up images of gracefulness that don’t always apply to Updike.
Along the way, Updike left us (or me, at least), with indelible moments in his fiction. Rabbit Angstrom’s young wife Janice, who accidentally drowns their baby in the bathtub; Rabbit’s son Nelson driving his car through the showroom window of his car dealershiop, years later, the Angstroms going to a swingers retreat, the main character in S. (1988), trying to find herself at an Indian ashram (one of Updikes most gleeful evisceratings); or the young narrator John who goes to a New Year’s Eve party in the 1959 short story “The Happiest I’ve Been.” It’s a long list, and I’m sure I’ll feel that sting of recognition as more remembrances are published.
It’s that short story that stays with me, though. I reread it tonight to remind myself of why the final sentence resonated so deeply with me.
“And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.”
The narrator is 19, I read it before I was 19, and it sealed within me an ideal of comfort, and ease among people. In the story, it’s John’s best friend who falls asleep as John drives through the night and a girl John met at a party who’ve fallen asleep beside him. I’d never really thought about it then, but it’s impossible to fall asleep next to someone who makes you uneasy. To make people comfortable around you to the point where they accept your protection; that’s a pretty good definition of a decent person.
Updike wasn’t to everyone’s liking. I remember selling a guy one of his novels at an Indianapolis Borders after college, and the guy said his wife hated Updike. ” ‘His books aren’t about anything but sex,’ ” he said she said. Sure, but they were also about what happens before and after, I’d say, and God, and desire and hopes and dreams and ego and the other stuff that happens off the clock. Told the right way, that was enough for me, and I bet it always will be.