Updike Screed or Updike's Creed?

John Updike's latest novel Terrorist is already a bestseller despite terrible reviews. I heard one of those reviewers on NPR, Maureen Corrigan, who likes just about everything. But she said this one disappointed her high expectations, because the young terrorist whose mind Updike tries to enter is only a mouthpiece for Updike's "screed" against modern US culture. She added that his anger boiled down to the observation that a landscape of McDonald's, WalMart, and StarBucks doesn't have much gravitas, and that we didn't need a great writer like Updike to know that. Her tag line: "It's an old man's book."

I haven't read the book, waiting to begin it until I've finished The March, but I doubt that she's on target, here. Updike has always, always looked between the cracks in our popular culture. In his early books, that meant diners, gymnasiums, cars, Doris Day, movie theatres. His 1977-ish novel The Coup, written from the point of view of a Moslem African dictator educated in Michigan, already played with a Moslem fundamentalist's mixed fascination and revulsion with our sex symbols and instant gratification.

I imagine Updike is doing what he has always done, walking in someone else's shoes awhile, portraying them fairly. If there's anger in Terrorist, it's that of the young Moslem man, not of the old man who wrote it.

I ran across an interesting blog at LitKicks (where they don't believe you relax with a good book - only with mediocre ones -- because good ones make you too joyful or too angry) in which the contributor reports on seeing Updike on stage in New York a couple of days ago. Here's some of what this observer says about Updike:

Updike has a mild manner and a great smile, a smile so big that at times there seem to be three people on stage: Jeffrey Goldberg [the interviewer], John Updike and John Updike's smile. He speaks with quiet confidence and little vanity, allowing Goldberg to throw one controversial question at him after another. Goldberg points out that John Updike had been one of the few literary figures of the 1960's to express support for the Vietnam War, and asks him to talk about George Bush and the war in Iraq. Updike accepts the comparison and acknowledges that, as in the 1960's, his current feelings are mixed: the war is going badly, but the Bush administration faced hard choices and deserves some sympathy for the frustrating position it's in.

Updike is clearly a principled moderate, and it's brave of him to insist on ignoring the popular delineations between red-state and blue-state dogmatism (his new book's sympathetic portrayal of a young terrorist seems designed to anger the right wing, while his refusal to loudly condemn the American war in Iraq will equally alienate the left). At Goldberg's prompting, Updike talks about the strong role of religious faith in his own life (he has always gone to church and believes this has helped him at various times in his life). He exudes a healthy open-mindedness towards all ways of life, and insists on avoiding abstractions and prejudices. "There are no sub-humans in the human race", John Updike says, and this is probably the one thing he says that most people in the crowd agree with.

Very Episcopalian, I'd add. I first read Updike because I ran across an essay in which he mentioned going to the Episcopal Church, not so much because he accepted everything in its creed, but because he's touched by the fact of a group of strangers getting together every week in this sanctuary, making a statement by their participation in this ritual that the rest of life matters. Literature itself makes the same statement, he says.

Read more about his under-appreciated novel Seek My Face at the "reading" part of my web site. Look under "links" in the sidebar of this page.

Updike Screed or Updike's Creed? | Category: Fiction, Religion, News & History