***EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was published just moments before the Editorial Board heard of the passing of John Updike, 76, whose work is discussed herein. This post is therefore dedicated to the memory of John Updike. See "John Updike, Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary," NYTimes.com 1/27/09.
One essay in particular caught our attention, "John Updike: Eros and God." Here are a few excerpts:
The everyday seizes [John] Updike's tireless gaze--babies, adolescents, couples, sometimes in stasis, as in genre painting, sometimes kinetic, like the swoop of a thought. ...
What is notable, and curious, in Updike is that his sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian's meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders, whether of exaltation or distress. In "The Deacon," a decaying old wooden church--rotted wiring, warped boards, leaky ceiling, worn hymnals, superannuated remnants of congregants--is nevertheless instinct with holy ardor, and with a kind of intergalactic holiness. ...
His is not a social faith. Though [the short story] "Lifeguard" closes with an exhortation to "be joyful," the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayist apercus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts. The acts are tremendously variegated; in the spacious precincts of eight hundred and more pages, human faces teem, landscapes and interiors are elegiacally documented, a thousand three-dimensional objects cast realistic shadows, time is phosphorescent, moods coagulate and dissolve. Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture.
For us here at the Journal, such a description of talented writing, itself talented writing, makes us wish to be talented writers.
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