Updike

I haven't yet mentioned the death, earlier this week, of John Updike. This is mostly because I haven't yet read a lot of Updike's work and it always feels weird to write about someone just because they've died. If their work or something they did meant something to me, of course, that's one thing, but to chime in just for the sake of noting their passing seems a bit silly to me.

In Updike's case, I just don't feel familiar enough with his body of work. I will say that the few things I have read have been incredibly good, stylistically speaking, which is not surprising. You don't get a reputation like his just for having a prolific number of books published. If you did, James Patterson and Nora Roberts would be considered literary geniuses!

I got the feeling, again just from the little I've read (short stories and critical essays; none of the novels, yet), that Updike's overall outlook was that of a typical straight white male of his generation, confused and put off by the social changes of the last fifty years.

One thing of his that particularly left me feeling irritated was his review of Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Spell (this is collected in his essay collection Due Considerations) which seemed to me to boil down to the fact that Updike thought Hollinghurst had included too much gay sex in the book. I couldn't help but feel, as I was reading the essay, that any gay sex would have seemed like too much for Updike, but maybe that's not an entirely fair point of view on my part.

I think that's largely why I've not read more of his work, though I still intend to.

Anyway, the reason that I'm bringing up John Updike now is that I just finished reading Ian McEwan's piece on his passing from The Guardian. McEwan is a writer I admire and I think the piece itself is worth reading, no matter what you thought of Updike's writing.

It certainly makes me want to read some of Updike's novels so that I can have a more fully informed opinion of this man who was undeniably a giant of 20th century American literature.