On the morning after John Updike’s death, I went to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Pikesville to pay a kind of homage. I wanted to make sure people were still reading him, and shake them by their lapels if they were not.
Updike was our great lyricist of modern small town anxiety, of sex and marriage and their furtive options, of Ted Williams swinging a baseball bat for the final time, of ordinary people reaching for God and wondering if he’s reaching back, of raw temptation and sin and the shadow areas where the American dream goes bad.
Once, in “Rabbit is Rich,” his great creation Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, hitting middle age and pondering the meaning of it all, says:
“I’ve been thinking about all the dead people I know lately. Oh, Pop and Mom, mostly. Wondering if they’re watching. You do so much to get your parents’ attention for so much of your life, it seems weird to be going on without them. I mean, who cares?”
So I went to the bookstore, and then reached the Harford County library, to find out if people – Mom and Pop, and the rest of us, too – still care about the remarkable Updike, who succumbed to lung cancer on Tuesday, at 76, after a writing life that included more than 50 books, more than 20 novels and countless short stories and essays and poetry collections.
“That crystal prose [has] been a part of our lives for so long,” the critic James Wolcott wrote of Updike’s death, “that it’s like having a light switched off and a corner of the room left dim, abandoned – unfillable.”
But have readers already stopped peering into those places where Updike and others try to shine some light into the darkness?
In the past year at the Pikesville Barnes & Noble, they’ve sold three copies of “Rabbit, Run” and not a single copy of any of the other three Rabbit classics. They’ve sold one copy of “Couples,” and none of “The Centaur,” and only four copies of “The Witches of Eastwick.”
“People are more interested in current best-sellers,” a Barnes & Noble customer service representative explained.
So I spoke to Irene Green, assistant branch manager for the Harford County Public Library’s Fallston branch. She said the county’s library system has “55 Updike titles.”
“Is he still being read?” she was asked.
“Oh, he’s very well respected,” Green said. “He’s gotten so many awards.”
“But, are the books being checked out?”
She said Updike’s most recent novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” was ordered last August. All five branches got copies. In the five months since, she said, a total of 22 copies have been checked out, across all of Harford County.
Oh, my.
Everybody talks about the death of literacy, but have we really forgotten the glories of Updike? He was a man who peeked into the delicacy of the flower petal, who slowed down a madly spinning world, who turned the simple, declarative sentence into an aria.
Maybe, in the computer era and the blogosphere, he slowed things down too much. Now the written words are flung at us by the millisecond, and the wisecrack and the thoughtless put-down are valued. Who has time for anything longer, when there’s another cheap smack down just around the corner?
But consider, for a moment, just a slice of Updike: his description, in “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” of Ted Williams rounding the bases after walloping a home run in the final at bat of his magnificent career:
“Williams ran as he always ran out home runs – hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back.
“Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”
We lose Updike, we lose one of our great and fearless explainers of human nature. He took us to places once considered too sensitive to explore, which is what great writers do.
“No point in keeping secrets,” he wrote, “we’ll all be dead soon enough.”
Updike’s death came too soon. But we’re left wondering if his audience already was dying out, unwilling to slow down for the graceful turn of phrase, the crystalline insight, the prose that read like the lyric of a song now gone faint.
