I kept reading his books, at least now and then. Maybe it would click. But my teenage years plodded along and no luck. Okay, he did a funny story about being a freshman at Harvard, and as I read “The Music School” a promising existential uproar built in my nerves. But the storm never broke and I don’t remember the story at all. Really I’d been hyped by a film adaptation, a half-hour affair running on public TV. No use. Looking back I realize I didn’t like John Updike.
As a teenager I had a particular view of what I needed in life. The key item was a note from the editors of The New Yorker explaining to people that I was worth noticing. This note would take the form of an acceptance letter for something I had sent in—a short story, probably. If I had that, I’d be able to walk into a roomful of people. Otherwise the situation, this entering a room and coping with everyone there, it didn’t work. I needed the note. Without it I figured my life wasn’t really viable.
John Updike received the lion’s share of these notes. This put him at the top of my particular tree. In my unspoken set-up for the world, there were people who were smarter than the regular people, the people at hand, and these smarter people singled you out because you were smarter too; specifically, smarter with words. Teachers singled me out from the other kids. Editors of magazines singled out adults from all the other adults, the routine people who didn’t have it. The New Yorker was the supreme magazine because all the smart people said so (as far as I knew). John Updike was the man The New Yorker kept sending acceptances to, so he was important in my world. That didn’t mean I liked him, just that I’d keep trying to. If I could read his stories and like them, that meant I was fit to write short stories The New Yorker would take.
Further, Updike’s stock in trade as a writer matched exactly with my idea of writing. At the time I took the simplest, most belly-to-the-ground approach to literary art. I figured you stuck words around a lump, and if the words were bright enough, the lump would be too. Everyday experiences, for example, just whatever you did on getting out of bed. Stick words around them of sufficient quality and you had a short story. At the end, and this part interested me less, you put some sort of dying fall for a close, something hushed and enigmatic that indicated vast properties offstage, an adult realm of regrets and heavy truths. I don’t say I wrote anything like this, since I wrote little. But John Updike wrote that stuff and plenty of it. Somebody interviewed him for a magazine, and Updike’s story about it ran in The New Yorker before anybody saw the profile. I don’t remember the story’s ending, but I bet a dying fall would’ve worked.
The young me looked for what he could in Updike’s pages. Typically I snuffled after his gift for sparklies, by which I mean striking, come-alive turns of phrase (“bare-shouldered bed scenes” for post-sex dialogue in a highbrow film). At times he dropped an insight or a homely bit of shared experience (the high school girl who smiles and nods like a good audience because the teacher’s eyes fall on her). But not enough turned up, and I come away with a dank impression. His non-ear for rhythm, the inert tangled bedsheets of his prose. The clumped sentences with cool phrases stranded inside them. The shreds of bleary adult experience (comfortable as seeing stubble and pajamas on somebody else’s dad). Everything always being about him somehow, and he’s always rueful and frazzled. The stories’ treadmill of “Epiphany approaching, there it is, next epiphany coming up.”
Once I was in college, Updike became one of my teenage years’ many dead letters. But junior year I took a class on writing short stories, so I started Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. I figured this was full of approved examples. One night I put the book down with a slip of paper halfway through and I never picked it up again. Decades later I reread Bech: The Book and this time didn’t go numb from boredom. On the other hand, it only seemed so-so. Now that I was an adult what he had to say about adulthood didn’t seem so advanced, and he still wrote prose in bales instead of sentences.
Maybe he’s good, lit majors will decide. But for me he wasn’t, he was just as I describe him. I still have trouble with a room of people, but if I read Updike again it’ll be to see how I like him and nothing else. If that’s not adulthood, it’s the closest I can get.
