A Year After Updike's Death

When I worked for the book publisher Alfred A. Knopf in the early 1990s, I remember a middle-aged female coworker complaining about John Updike’s view of women. I understood what she meant, having recently read Rabbit, Run, with its pitiless portrayal of the wife, Janice, whom her husband, Rabbit, constantly critiques intellectually and sexually. As a reader, I was sympathetic toward Rabbit, but as a young woman, I was horrified. Wasn’t Janice a victim, someone promised fulfillment in marriage and motherhood only to find boredom, postpartum depression, and exhaustion? She was my mother –or worse, me—without the degree. But I’d found the book engaging and well written. What was a young feminist to say? 

And if in my twenties I entertained doubts about Updike’s point of view, just think what surfaced in my forties reading his book The Witches of Eastwick, where three middle-aged divorcees form a coven, come into extraordinary witchy powers, have sexual encounters with whomever they want (including one another), and cast spells that leave other women spitting feathers, straw, even tacks and pennies? How to handle the passages where Updike described their “puckers and blemishes” and “false teats”? Although Updike was artfully cagey in securing the narrative as fantastic or merely metaphorical, I have to admit I winced a bit at these characterizations and descriptions.

But I get ahead of myself. Return to the nineties, 1991 specifically, when Knopf threw its 75^th anniversary party. Many authors were in attendance, including the tall, well-mannered Mr. Updike, whom I stood in line to meet. When my turn came, I complimented him on a story of his I’d admired in The New Yorker. He smiled and nodded once, looking down, which transformed his acknowledgment into a bow.

I can’t imagine what he thought of me—a five-foot-two, skinny, “big-haired” twenty-something. At the time, I considered myself straight and a traditional Presbyterian. No doubt, I lacked irony and appeared overly earnest.

In 1993, I left New York for The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, having cut and dyed my hair and having been rejected by a potential girlfriend. Estranged from organized religion, I ruefully referred to my solo or group Sunday brunches as “The Church of the New York Times.”

Frank Conroy, the Workshop’s director and author of Stop-Time had once been Updike’s roommate. The two men reminded me of each other—tall, with cumbersome limbs.  And there was something else, too, but what? Hearing Frank quote Updike in class brought back my earlier encounter with him at the Knopf party, just as Frank’s references to other writers seemed to summon them into the room. These are our people—Frank seemed to be telling us—so listen to them, learn from them. One of Frank’s biggest gifts to us, I believe, was that he accepted us into his circle, drew us into a community. And there was John Updike, sitting among us, smiling bashfully.

Sometime after I graduated from the Workshop, I proofread Updike’s book In the Beauty of the Lilies. I enjoyed the first half, which focuses on the sympathetic-if-faith-fallen protagonist and his son. Then the son’s daughter, Essie, takes over—a vain, shallow Hollywood star with a lukewarm faith (possibly fueling more difficulties with women readers). In the final section, I found myself relieved to be with a strong believer (Essie’s son), even though he ties himself to an apocalyptic cult. Updike was cunning; with its dramatization of Americans’ twentieth-century Protestant experience, the book haunted me.

I was reminded of Janice, Updike’s earlier creation, in 2001, when I gave birth to twin boys, both with special needs. My partner, Lisa, helped when she wasn’t working, and congregants at my new church reached out to me, the much-beleaguered stay-at-home mother. I didn’t sit in front of the TV and smoke cigarettes and drink, as Janice did, but I certainly wanted to.

And Janice’s husband, Rabbit, hovered near during a later telephone discussion I had with my older brother as one of my babies screamed in the background. Trying to encourage me as a parent, my brother began talking about our parents, particularly our father, three years Updike’s junior—one of the Silent Generation, that group sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and the Boomers. “They married to have sex regularly,” he said, pointing out that this was before the advent of the Pill and meaning by his tone that what sex—and marriages—they got may have disappointed them. I realized that men my father’s age (and thus, Rabbit) may have felt trapped; perhaps they were victims, too.

Frank Conroy, then former director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, died in 2005. My partner, Lisa (also a Workshop grad), and I walked around stunned for days. “He believed passionately in fiction and thought of writers as answering a special call,” Lisa said glumly one evening. “Now who will pull for us?” Remembering one of Frank’s favorite exhortations to his community of writers, I boomed, “Courage!” which made us both laugh.

Then, one day last winter, Lisa called me from her office. “You heard John Updike died?” she asked.

The road before me went suddenly tunnel-like. “No,” I said.

“Are you okay?”                                                                                                         

“Wow,” I said. “I feel like when Frank Conroy died, like lost my dad. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said.

I’d recently finished writing a novel. Reading one agent’s rejection, I wanted to yell, “You’re arguing with my narrator, and she chose me!” A writer has less choice about her characters than a reader might think. Which is, in part, what makes me look at Rabbit, Run so differently now. I’ve been in Janice’s position and, even then, I’d still defend Rabbit; he speaks to a particular generation’s experience.

A recent rereading of the book also made me realize that in addition to critiquing Janice, Rabbit turns his sometimes blistering eye on everyone, including his love interest, Ruth. He describes her as “fat,” “an incredible continent,” but rather than being simply demeaning, these descriptions put the reader in touch with Rabbit’s changing consciousness. One minute she looks bad to him, the next, good—or perhaps both at the same time. But there is still an obvious frisson between the two of them, and as a reader I found myself rooting for Ruth over Rabbit’s wife, Janice. An uncomfortable position but more understandable to me now, no doubt influenced by becoming a writer myself.

And that writerly instinct also informed my recent reading of The Witches of Eastwick. I thought to myself, How, exactly, did Updike manage to walk the line between magical and metaphorical? That’s a feat. And he had such a great time with the female characters that I forgave the bald assessments of their aging bodies. I found the book screamingly funny, and as a whole, it seemed to be Updike’s way of tipping his hat to the undeniable presence and power of women of a certain age.

I also view Updike’s work differently after having traveled in and out of the church. I still think about Lilies and what he might have been trying to convey: how Americans’ loss of belief in combination with a too literal reliance on the visual (being on-camera=immortality) might lead some of those left bewildered to a cataclysmic display of faith. Think David Koresh, think Heaven’s Gate. I’d say Updike got it right.  

I saw that even though I disliked Essie, the Hollywood character, Updike enjoyed embodying her. The book lovingly weaves in a history of the movies, and he obviously adored the old female stars, despite their flaws. In a mirrored fashion, he revealed both his love for and discomfort with film as a medium: its capacity for both majesty and blandness. He also folded in events of American history, and I could sense his discomfort with the culture’s changes. He was never judgmental—he had great sympathy for his characters—but I can feel him holding on, however tenuously, to his God.  

Younger women might think I’m dimwitted for liking Updike. A woman of the civil rights era might scoff. Still, I can’t disavow him, knowing what I do about love, sex, and motherhood, of faith, middle age, and being American. 

Besides, I can still see Updike’s nod/bow. I’m at the mercy of the muses—he seemed to say—as well as the mercy of my readers. When I spoke recently with Lisa of the similarities between Updike and Frank Conroy, she said thoughtfully, “They were both courtly.” That’s it, I thought.

There are many authors whose books I’ve worked on, but somehow, John Updike has become a compadre. Not what I expected, probably not what he expected, but I’m glad for his company. And I know I’ll go right on missing him.

Note: I wrote this essay in 2010, not for any particular audience but simply because I felt moved to write it. I owe thanks to my partner, Lisa Curtis, and to Lisa McKenzie, fellow Writers' Workshop grads, for their input, as well as my brother Christopher and his friend Louis Bayard, who also helped shape it.