John Updike : Painter of Domestic Interiors

Not too long ago, though perhaps longer than it seems, I was rearranging my bookshelves when I came across my half-forgotten copy of Memories of the Ford Administration. Ever since that time I have been intending to read the book again, but, inevitably, have not got around to it. Now I will, of course, for there is nothing as motivating to readers as the death of an author. John Updike, as most will know by now, has died of cancer of the lung. He was 76. Memories of the Ford Administration was my introduction to John Updike, the man I once heard or read described as a painter of Dutch domestic interiors. The description fitted him well. You will know the sort of picture to which it refers: exact and clinically clean and detailed, yet warm and with a light that bathes everything and makes it seem luminous. It is the world of the common man, Middle America, I suppose, seen as a basically sad world, yet one that is beautiful in its sadness. And no matter what the source of this sad beauty (be it politics or patterns of domesticity) it suffuses everything, spreads everywhere. For me it is all there in Memories of the Ford Administration. Indeed, it is all there in the first paragraph of Memories of the Ford Administration:

"I remember I was sitting among my abandoned children watching television when Nixon resigned. My wife was out on a date, and had asked me to babysit. We had been separated since June. This was, of course, August. Nixon, with his bulgy face and his menacing, slipped-cog manner, seemed about to cry. The children and I had never seen a president resign before; nobody in the history of the United States had ever seen that."

He will no doubt be best remembered for The Rabbit Tetralogy, four great novels published at intervals of ten years, give or take a year, from 1960, which follow the life and times of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom from youth to decline. These are the stories which won him the reputation of the man who kicked open the American bedroom door, and indeed, marriage, sex, divorce and adultery were high on his list of concerns, but so were feminism, the Vietnam war and much else. He painted his interiors, though, on a small canvas as the writing had that quality of beauty which made plot slightly peripheral. It is the writing you remember when you read him. But small canvas or not, as they used to say of The News of the World newspaper, "the whole of human life" was there.

His oeuvre was large, though; a dozen or so collections of poetry, plays, works of non-fiction and short stories. He was awarded almost every literary prize (some more than once) except the Nobel. Will his tetralogy prove to be the Great American Novel? Not for anyone on this side of the pond to say, but to finish with a cliche (which he would never have done), he will be sorely missed.