John Updike died today. I wrote about him, in a fashion, on my <a href=”http://www.lauralippman.com/oct05.html”_blank” “> website</a> back in 2005. I really don’t have much to add. I loved the Rabbit books, particularly “Rabbit is Rich,” somehow never read the Bech books, although I may still. The other novels I read — well, in Lippman vernacular, they were not for me.
ooooooooo I didn’t know we had the same Rabbit taste!
I did like the part when his granddaughter didn’t die in Rabbit at Rest, too. And how he never stopped referring to Pru as “wide in the beam.” It was so awful it made you want to gain 10 pounds just out of spite.
Oh, shoot, I mean “broad in the beam.” I’m blocking it.
So, that’s why I keep gaining those 10 pounds!
Is “Rabbit is Rich” the only one where no woman one dies? The baby girl in the first, Jill in the second, Rabbit in the fourth (along with Thelma, the, um, Toni Bentley-esque paramour in “Rabbit is Rich,” IIRC). When does Ma Springer bite the dust? How can someone with my memory pop up with Ma Springer? And Melanie, the girl from Kent State, who waitresses at the crepe place.
Still, it was a revelation for me to read literature about people who were recognizably like people I knew, watching “All in the Family” and taking Polaroid photos. Although not, um, the same kind of Polaroid photos.
ETA: I realize that Rabbit is NOT a woman. I’m writing fast and loose.
I can only read the first one and a half sentences of your post…
Thank you for the Mary Gordon quote:
“whereas it will be no loss for me to contemplate not reading the final installment of the Rabbit tetralogy . . . because Updike’s style, with its fake poetic otiosity, provides me with insufficient compensations.”
I never got the whole Updike/Rabbit thing no matter how many times I tried or how many friends whose opinions I really valued told me about how great the books were. I did think the style otiose (not that I knew that that was the word) and the tone too superior. But I always thought that I just wasn’t bright enough to get it since the rest of my known world really enjoyed them.
Nonetheless, it is always a sad day when the world loses a writer who has given so many people the pleasure of reading good books.
Hi all,
Has anyone commented anywhere on the end of “The Girl in the Green Raincoast”? I thought we’d blog about this somewhere.
Very good denouement, with dogs helping Tess, then interesting ending with Tess, Crow and the new baby with health problems.
Will this be the end of Tess Monaghan’s career of being an investigator or will the baby become healthier and Tess find a way to investigate from home or with more help from Mrs. Blossom or will Crow stay home with the baby so Tess can work?
Any bites here?
Kathy D.
There’s a website, http://www.lauralippman.com, which I update sorta monthly. If you click on website in the entry, it should take you straight to the archived post. Otherwise, you can cut and paste the URL into your browser, then click on archives, then go to October 2005. Sorry for the confusion, Sylvia.
And Cornelia, it’s funny that you mention reviews. Someone Close To Me said last night: “I guess Martin Amis is happy.” I found that appalling, although I understood the context: Updike gave Amis a pretty bad review for Night Train, which was notable for pouncing on Amis, in the lede, for one thing he got right about cop culture, at least in Baltimore. “I am a police.” Amis had read “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” as research and was smitten with it.
Still, I can’t think Amis is “happy.” As someone whose knowledge of Amis/Updike goes beyond the self-referential, I was already familiar with Amis’s 1991 interview with Updike, which is pretty laudatory. It begins with Amis expressing concern over Updike’s health, then Updike worrying about Amis flying on a seven-seater plane.
I have cheated and gone in search of it and find it has a delightful observation. ” . . . one should stress these occasions are not suave at all. However genial, they are always anxious and exhausting, with the interviewer fielding about 80 percent of of the nerves.” As someone who interviewed quite a few writers in my day — never Updike, but Amis, in fact — that captures it. Of course, the proportion of nerves is related directly to how much one admires/respects the writer in question, and how much that writer lets the interviewer off the hook.
Amis goes on: The literary interview won’t tell you what someone a writer is _like_. It will tell you what a writer is _like to interview_. Yes, and I graded on that curve. Whatever a writer’s reputation, personally and critically, I felt it was my job to capture the hour we were together, and try to place that in the context of the work. I did dozens of these interviews over the years and can say that 90 percent of the writers were lovely, one was terrifying (Doris Lessing), one became a very good friend and one was an absolute dick. (I’d tell you his name but the lovely irony is that you wouldn’t know of him, not as a novelist.)
That’s so funny, I just told someone to add in Marjorie Morningstar to Updike reading! And Jaws.
Hmmm…doesn’t his daughter’s mother die? Or is she just sick? Or just really, really fat? To Updike, I think that is like death.
John Updike died today. I wrote about him, in a fashion, on my
This is all that came through in your message Laura. I’m all a twitter to know what you said.
If you said on my blog well isn’t this your blog? If so why are these the only words that came through? If you know that is.
I will have to read the Rabbits, now (I’ll shelve them next to Marjorie Morningstar, of course).
My Uncle Bill was golfing with Updike last summer, and sent him a copy of my first book shortly thereafter. I hope that had nothing to do with his demise. (I still worry that an old book review of mine back in Syracuse may have hastened the death of Raymond Carver. I’m all about negative ego-centricity.)
Ah yes, i’m another “never read him”. Nor Saul Bellow nor most of Philip Roth. I mention these names as recently i read a whine about how the Nobel doesn’t go to American writers and these were named as worthy. I never GOT Updike, I admit. the subject matter never appeared to me. the obit I read discussed his focus as being on “middle-class angst” especially as it affects white men and I just can’t find myself interested. Is that a fair cop on what he wrote about? I think I read <i>Witches of Eastwick</i> once. it was okay, i guess, as I recall. But I just used to glaze over whey I tried to read many of those authors who are of the “literature” track. I never did warm to mainstream fiction, I guess.
Oy, such a philistine I is. I don’t want to be, but I is.
Apropos of nothing exactly except me channeling my inner um, maidel? i have the best giggle site. See Jewzo.com – it’s a Jewish version of the Chinese zodiac cycle. I was born in the year of the knish. How “bout that?
Kathy – if you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll confide in you that I’ve not read GGR yet. The plan is to read a few more of the Classic-Monaghans, before I earn my way into the most advanced (final?) Monoghan.
But I WILL say that, despite my being behind the curve here in Lippman-land (so to speak), I’m enjoying the ride immensely