John Updike passed away today, at 76. After devoting a year of my undergraduate life partially to Rabbit, Run, I feel I should give him a few lines on my blog. Neither my advisor nor the female Faulkner scholar on my honors committee could stomach his writing. As the latter said, "His prose is glorious, but his ideas about women..." Recently he spoke about the bliss of misogyny in an interview with New York.
His quote above captures what was so elusive and stirring about this man. Even when he was older and wiser than most highly regarded American authors, a demigod towering over the masses who just couldn't write such beautiful sentences as he did, you got the feeling he still wrote like a young man. He grew and saw America grow with him; his character Rabbit sank to lower depths but also found more meaning in spirituality as the years went on. Yet Updike never uncovered the answer to his place in the universe or gave in and went feminist on us. He stayed the course, writing with the vigor of a youngster out to impress, but with the knowledge that greatness may be ephemeral it sure doesn't come laced in politically correct ribbon.
"All men are boys time is trying to outsmart," he wrote in Rabbit Redux. Let's hope he earns in rest what he sought in running.
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