Authors in the US and internationally yesterday paid tribute to Updike’s style and substance
JOHN UPDIKE, who died on Tuesday at the age of 76, “was one of the great stars in the constellation of post-war American fiction,” the writer David Lodge said yesterday in one of many tributes from fellow writers. “He was up there with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.”
Updike, one of the leading US novelists and critics of his generation, who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died of lung cancer.
John Banville expressed real dismay. “He was one of the great modern-day prose stylists in the English language, and if his style on occasion outstripped his content, so what? – the pleasure of reading Updike was always intense. Even at his most sophisticated he retained something in him of the Pennsylvania farm boy, and that Frostian and Emersonian directness was a foil to the more baroque urges of his language.”
And his fellow American author Richard Ford said that “for all of his brilliance, his immense curiosity and great ‘width’ as a writer who virtually thought straight on to the page at an extremely high level, in America we seemed almost to take him for granted. It’s our way. He’d been around us all those years. As if there might be another writer like John come along in time. Well, there won’t be.”
“He was a modern master,” the novelist Ian McEwan said, “a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence . . . We are all the poorer now.”
Jane Smiley wrote fondly of her favourite Updike character, Bech: “Bech is not Updike; he is more like, say, Saul Bellow, and he is put through a vast array of experiences that are quite humiliating. Bech is genially, but pointedly, satirised for being boorish, self-centred and insensitive, while Updike, as narrator, is wise and insightful.
“What I love about it is that it is wonderfully mean. Updike is such a limber stylist that you feel sympathy with Bech, but admir- ation for the narrator. It illustrates just how sly Updike was.”
Zadie Smith paid tribute to Updike as critic. “He was a generous, intelligent reader who produced criticism that emphasised the intimate joys of reading, free of the usual dogma and cant,” she wrote. “He had an almost sacred, illuminated sense of our little community of writers and readers and his death is a great loss”.