There are moments in our lives when we feel above and beyond our ascribed status as mere humans and these mental flirtations with the Ubermensch are often borne out of drawing causal relationships between our actions and those of the world at large. These moments are just another thread of life’s rich tapestry, but devious ones at that. Nearly a year ago, I slammed an already jaded copy of ‘Trust Me’, a collection of short stories by John Updike, onto a table, wild with frustration. “A pretentious Desperate Housewives,” I muttered to no-one in particular. The proof that words can certainly do more damage was apparent the following morning. John Updike had passed away. And I had killed him with my ire.
My emotions flitted between guilt and sorrow – I began to attempt to atone for this heinous sin of killing one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th Century by rekindling my passion for him via the Rabbit series of books.
This series, detailing the trials and tribulations of Rabbit Angstrom, is incredibly well crafted; it is the evolution of the American everyman, with Angstrom’s problems with life, death, and everything in between told in an intricate yet accessible fashion, with these qualms replicated throughout the American middle classes. This leitmotif of suburbia is present throughout the majority of Updike’s works, and it is owing to the plainness of his chosen canvas that the beauty of his prose can stand out all the more. Updike stated that he wished “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and in this he was highly successful. One gets the impression that they are viewing a world through a magnifying glass, such is the painstaking detail provided to all aspects of the work.
Although it has been proven that the man himself was a mere mortal, his works will age gracefully, but not succumb to the ravages of time. The narratives are unmistakably periods of their time, or “tickets to the America around me” and Updike put it, all told in a style that he had honed throughout his prolific writing career.
A year has elapsed since his passing, and the literary world seems a poorer place without the latest offerings from his pen. Following the lazy scorn that I had poured over his work, I had extinguished my passion for Updike’s prose. It is only through his death that I was able to rekindle this ardour, although I sincerely wish that such a drastic event hadn’t been necessary for me to see the error of my ways.
Alexander Britton
Tags: john updike
