Mr. Updike

The other day, I finished reading The Book Thief, and, casting around for something to fill my time until I could get to the library, I picked up my copy of John Updike's short-story collection, Trust Me. John Updike. Now there's a name you haven't heard in quite a while. One of The Big Guns. The New Yorker. The Atlantic. Playboy. Born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Graduated from Harvard in 1954. Spent a year in England on a scholarship in Oxford. On the staff of The New Yorker from 1955 to 1957. One of only three writers to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice. Died in 2009.

In my early days, my preference ran to another writer named John -- John Cheever. (Whom I still recommend highly.) I had the impression that Cheever's stories were of a higher quality than Updike's, though I had never actually read any of Updike's. I assume this judgment came from what I had absorbed about Mr. Updike through nebulous remarks gleaned from reviews and book covers: his preoccupation with sex and infidelity, drinking and New England lifestyles. Not being married myself, I had little interest in the swirling interplay of personalities that made up a couple; their infidelities especially bored me. Raised Southern Baptist, I had little interest in the rutting habits of Northern Episcopalians. That a book by Updike came to rest on my shelf is due, I'm sure, merely to a casual saunter through some used-book store and a curiosity about a writer I had no real intention of reading.

John Updike in 1989

That said, however, I admit I may have done Mr. Updike an injustice. The story I have just now finished -- "The Other" -- makes me think of the reddish-orange glow of sunset at the end of a warm September day. It has a feeling of languid nostalgia about it, a wistful reflection on what might soon be, tinged with a mild regret for what might have been. Yes, there is a casual, almost flippant, ambling on about carnal relationships, but there is also something shy, almost coy, with the language in which the author couches recognition of unrealized possibilities, of golden moments forever just beyond reach.

It may be that if I continue reading in this collection, I'll find all the other stories are merely disappointing variations on this same theme, redundant retellings to the point of tawdriness. My instinct, however, is to give Mr. Updike at least one more chance to prove himself. Who knows? Maybe I'll even like Rabbit Run.