Editing John Updike (section)

==Themes==
{{quote box
| quote  = All in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.
| source = —[[Rabbit Angstrom]].<ref>John Updike, ''Rabbit at Rest'' (1990), Knopf, pp. 308</ref>
| width  = 200
| align  = right
}}
The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, America,<ref>''The Economist'', "[http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13014056 An American subversive]", January 29, 2009</ref> and death.<ref name="bellis">Jack De Bellis (ed.), "Mortality and Immortality", ''The John Updike Encyclopedia'' (2000), pp. 286. See here for many subsequent quotes and citations on death.</ref> He often combined them, especially in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."<ref name="lehmann" />

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.<ref name="wood" /> Updike's novels often act as [[dialectic]]al [[theology|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.<ref name="schiff" /> Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaardian]] [[Knight of Faith]].<ref name="boswell"/>

Describing his purpose in writing prose in the introduction to his ''Early Stories: 1953–1975'' (2004), Updike wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due".<ref name="earlystories"/> Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of [[Kansas]]."<ref>Robert McCrun, "[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/01/john-updike-literary-generation John Updike was of a generation that changed the literary landscape irrevocably]," ''The Guardian'', February 1, 2009</ref> Some have suggested<ref name="karshan" /> that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "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 color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."<ref>John Updike, "The Dogwood Tree", ''Assorted Prose'' (1965), Knopf.</ref>

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

{{blockquote|text=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.<ref>''Time'', "[https://web.archive.org/web/20081123022310/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,838313-6,00.html View from the Catacombs]", 26 April 1968, pp. 6</ref>}}

The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex.<ref name="batsegundo">The Bat Segundo Show, [http://www.edrants.com/segundo/the-bat-segundo-show-50/ Show #50, John Updike]</ref> In Champion's interview with Updike on ''The Bat Segundo Show'', Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in his prose.<ref name="batsegundo" /> Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is [[adultery]], especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in ''[[Couples (novel)|Couples]]'' (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family".<ref>[[Antonya Nelson]], "[https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/2.html Remembering Updike] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222214718/http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/2.html |date=February 22, 2014 }}", ''The New Yorker'' online</ref>

===United States===
Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. [[ZZ Packer]] wrote that in Updike, "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."<ref>ZZ Packer, "[https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd Remembering Updike] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140302103650/http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd |date=March 2, 2014 }}", ''The New Yorker'' online</ref>

The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to [[Julian Barnes]], as "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life".<ref>Julian Barnes, "[https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/2.html Remembering Updike] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222214718/http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/2.html |date=February 22, 2014 }}", ''The New Yorker'' online</ref> But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America".<ref>Jack De Bellis (ed.), "More Matter", ''The John Updike Encyclopedia'' (2000), pp. 281.</ref> Adam Gopnik concludes that "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 [[Toyota]]s and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful."<ref name="gopnik" />

Updike's novels about America almost always contain references to political events of the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary citizens take place against this wider background.

===Death===
Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.<ref name ="bellis" /> 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 has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer.<ref name = "bellis" /> Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence".<ref name="bellis" />

Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed

<blockquote>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.'<ref>{{Citation | first = Michiko | last = Kakutani | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28appr.html | title = An Appraisal: A Relentless Updike Mapped America 's Mysteries | newspaper = The New York Times | date = January 27, 2009}}.</ref></blockquote>

Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):

{{poemquote|
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...<ref>{{Citation | first = John | last = Updike | author-link = John Updike | contribution = Perfection Wasted | title = Collected Poems: 1953–1993 | year = 1995 | publisher = Knopf}}.</ref>}}