Editing John Updike (section)

==Critical reputation and style==
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| source = —[[Martin Amis]]<ref>Martin Amis, "[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/28/johnupdike-usa He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy]", ''The Guardian'', 28 January 2009</ref>
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Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation.<ref>"[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?]" ''The New York Times'', May 21, 2006, "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages" listed the Rabbit series as one of the few greatest works of modern American fiction.</ref> He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers.<ref name="mighty pen" /> The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.<ref name="clc"/><ref name="karshan">Thomas Karshan, "[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n07/kars01_.html Batsy]", ''London Review of Books'', March 31, 2005</ref>

Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast [[Pennsylvania]], in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries.<ref>{{cite book |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date= April 23, 2013|title=John Updike: A Critical Biography |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aavWAQAAQBAJ |location=Oxford |publisher=Praeger |page=44 |isbn= 9780313384042}}</ref> SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Zylstra |first1=SA |date=1973 |title=John Updike and the Parabolic Nature of the World |journal=Soundings |volume=53 |issue=3 |pages= 323–337|jstor=41177889 }}</ref> Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pinkser |first1=Sanford |date=2009 |title=John Updike, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, and I |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/269601/ |journal=Sewanee Review|volume=117 |issue=3 |pages=492–494 |doi= 10.1353/sew.0.0156|s2cid=161771807 }}</ref> Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Mathé |first1=Sylvie |date=2010 |title=In Memoriam John Updike (1932-2009): That 'Pennsylvania thing' |url=https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5074 |journal=Transatlantica |issue=2 |doi= 10.4000/transatlantica.5074|doi-access=free }}</ref>

Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to [[Marcel Proust|Proust]] and [[Vladimir Nabokov|Nabokov]].<ref name="clc" /> Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for [[misogynistic]] depictions of women and sexual relationships.<ref name="clc" />

Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and [[syntax]] functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader".<ref name="clc" /> On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".<ref name="clc" />

Updike's character [[Rabbit Angstrom|Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom]], the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his ''magnum opus'', has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with [[Huckleberry Finn (character)|Huckleberry Finn]], [[Jay Gatsby]], [[Holden Caulfield]] and others.<ref name="lehmann">Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28updike.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle Class, Dies at 76]", ''The New York Times'', January 28, 2009</ref> A 2002 list by ''Book'' magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five.<ref>''Book'' magazine, March/April 2002, "[https://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2002/mar/020319.characters.html 100 Best Fictional Characters since 1900]", via [[NPR]]</ref> The Rabbit novels, the [[Henry Bech]] stories, and the Maples stories have been [[Western canon|canonized]] by [[Everyman's Library]].<ref>[http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/authors.html "Everyman's Library: Authors"], Random House</ref>

After Updike's death, [[Harvard University|Harvard]]'s [[Houghton Library]] acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.<ref>Tracy Jan, "[https://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/10/07/harvard_buys_updike_archive/ Harvard buys Updike archive]", ''Boston Globe'', October 7, 2009</ref> 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society,<ref>[http://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/ "The John Updike Society Homepage"]. The John Updike Society. Retrieved December 9, 2009.</ref> a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works". The Society will begin publishing ''The John Updike Review'', a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at [[Alvernia University]].<ref>[http://www.alvernia.edu/johnupdike/johnupdike.html "The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference."] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100528001638/http://www.alvernia.edu/johnupdike/johnupdike.html |date=May 28, 2010 }} Alvernia University. Retrieved December 9, 2009.</ref>

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 end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half".

McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and concluded:

{{blockquote|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 (arts)|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."<ref>Ian McEwan, "[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22391 On John Updike]", ''New York Review of Books'' Vol 56 No 4, 12 March 2009</ref>}}

[[Jonathan Raban]], highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called ''[[Rabbit at Rest]]'' "one of the very few modern novels in English&nbsp;... that one can set beside the work of [[Charles Dickens|Dickens]], [[William Makepeace Thackeray|Thackeray]], [[George Eliot]], [[James Joyce|Joyce]], and not feel the draft&nbsp;... 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."<ref>Jonathan Raban, ''The Oxford Book of the Sea'' (1993), Oxford University Press, pp. 509–517.</ref>

The novelist [[Philip Roth]], considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals,<ref>"[http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/updike/appreciation.html John Updike: 2008 Jefferson Lecture] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090201051145/http://neh.gov/whoweare/Updike/Appreciation.html |date= 1 February 2009 }}", [[National Endowment for the Humanities]]</ref> wrote, "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]]."<ref name="lehmann" />

The noted critic [[James Wood (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".<ref>James Wood, ''The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief'' (2000), "John Updike's Complacent God", Modern Library, pp. 192.</ref> In a review of ''Licks of Love'' (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both praised and criticized 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". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:

<blockquote>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]]-[[Karl Barth|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—[[Rabbit Remembered|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.<ref name="wood">James Wood, "[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n08/wood02_.html Gossip in Gilt]", ''London Review of Books'', 19 April 2001</ref></blockquote>

In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the [[Oxford University|Oxford]] critic Thomas Karshan asserted 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:

<blockquote>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 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.<ref name="karshan" /></blockquote>

[[Harold Bloom]] once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist&nbsp;... He specializes in the easier pleasures."<ref>Richard Eder, "The Paris Interviews", ''The New York Times'', December 25, 2007.</ref> Bloom also edited an important collection of [[literary criticism|critical]] essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages".<ref>Harold Bloom, ed., ''Modern Critical Views of John Updike'', "Introduction," Chelsea House, New York, 1987.</ref>

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 given the chance to review ''[[Rabbit Is Rich]]''. He replied:

<blockquote>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&nbsp;... 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 Angstrom|Rabbit]] is very much possessed of a [[paradise lost]], of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through [[eroticism|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.<ref>Dick Cavett, "[http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/writers-bloc-when-updike-and-cheever-came-to-visit/?apage=5 Writers Bloc: When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120714155051/http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/writers-bloc-when-updike-and-cheever-came-to-visit/?apage=5 |date=July 14, 2012 }}", ''The New York Times'', February 13, 2009. Video October 14, 1981</ref></blockquote>

''[[The Fiction Circus]]'', an online and [[multimedia]] [[literary magazine]], called Updike one of the "four [[Great American Novel]]ists" of his time along with Philip Roth, [[Cormac McCarthy]], and [[Don DeLillo]], each jokingly represented as a sign 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, the ''Circus'' asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a ''vital'' writer".<ref>S. Future, "[http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=280&mode=one Updike]", The Fiction Circus, January 27, 2009,</ref>

[[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&nbsp;... 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 exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."<ref name="gopnik"/>

The critic [[James Wolcott]], in a review of Updike's last novel, ''[[The Widows of Eastwick]]'' (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "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."<ref>James Wolcott, "[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/wolc01_.html Caretaker/Pallbearer]", ''London Review of Books'', January 1, 2009</ref>

[[Gore Vidal]], in a controversial essay in the ''[[Times Literary Supplement]]'', 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". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "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."<ref>Gore Vidal, "[https://web.archive.org/web/20091005182937/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5610640.ece Rabbit's own burrow]", ''Times Literary Supplement'', April 26, 1996</ref>

[[Robert B. Silvers]], editor of ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".<ref>Brand, Madeleine. [https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99921377 Robert B. Silvers interview for NPR Remembrances: "John Updike: The Shy Man And Great Writer"]. NPR, Day to Day, January 27, 2009</ref> The short-story writer [[Lorrie Moore]], who once called Updike "American literature's greatest short story writer&nbsp;... and arguably our greatest writer",<ref name="rourke">Mary Rourke, "[https://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-john-updike28-2009jan28,0,3942596.story John Updike dies at 76; Pulitzer-winning author]", ''Los Angeles Times'', January 28, 2009</ref> reviewed Updike's body of short stories in ''The New York Review'', praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way".<ref>Lorrie Moore, "[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16794 Home Truths]", ''New York Review of Books'', November 20, 2003</ref> In her work on Updike, [[Biljana Dojčinović]] has argued that his short story collection ''[[The Afterlife and Other Stories]]'' is a pivotal work that demonstrates a change in his writing on feminism.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Shipe |first1=Matthew |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ChaeDwAAQBAJ&dq=biljana+doj%C4%8Dinovi%C4%87&pg=PA6 |title=Updike and Politics: New Considerations |last2=Dill |first2=Scott |date=2019-06-27 |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |isbn=978-1-4985-7561-4 |pages=6 |language=en}}</ref>

Updike's array of awards includes two [[Pulitzer Prize for Fiction|Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction]], two [[National Book Award]]s, three [[National Book Critics Circle]] awards, the 1989 [[National Medal of Arts]], the 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 U.S. government's highest [[humanities]] honor; Updike's lecture was titled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art".<ref name="howard">{{cite news|first=Jennifer|last=Howard|url=http://chronicle.com/news/article/4541/in-jefferson-lecture-updike-says-american-art-is-known-by-its-insecurity|title=In Jefferson Lecture, Updike Says American Art Is Known by Its Insecurity|work=[[The Chronicle of Higher Education]]|date=May 23, 2008}}</ref><ref name="art">{{cite news|first=Jay |last=Tolson |url=https://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/05/23/john-updike-on-american-art.html |title=John Updike on American Art |work=U.S. News & World Report |date=May 23, 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090202092557/http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/05/23/john-updike-on-american-art.html |archive-date=February 2, 2009 }}</ref> 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".<ref name="art"/>