O Great Sars,

I’m studying short stories right now in English class, and coincidentally one of the selected authors is your dear friend John Updike. I’ve been trying to explain to my classmates exactly why I can’t stand the man, but I can never get the words out right. I was thinking that if I shined the great light of your wisdom upon them, they just might listen. So…why do you hate Updike?

Signed,

Overworked and Updiked

Dear Aren’t We All,

Riffling through the archives looking for the rant I surely must have plunged into on the subject, I…didn’t find it. I thought sure I’d explained why I don’t like Updike’s writing, but I see that’s not the case. Ready?

It’s too self-conscious. It’s too proud of itself. It stands back to admire itself. I can’t point to a particular phrasing or example, because I don’t have any Updike to hand (…obviously), but it’s a sense I’ve always gotten from his fiction — that he’s presenting certain passages, certain phrasings, with a falsely modest flourish. The writing’s awareness of itself and what it’s trying to do is off-putting.

Of course, this assessment raises the question of whether I find Updike more irritating because I know what it’s like to come up with an especially incisive or fresh description, and to then set it as the centerpiece and push everything else back from it. Many of my short stories begin from a single phrase that I thought up, and cut like a gem, and it is one of the worst parts of writing that you have to jettison that stuff at times — that you want credit from the world for cleverly comparing one of your characters to a boiled potato, but it does nothing for the story and you have to get rid of it.

There’s also the question of whether I would like Updike more if I liked his characters more. We aren’t really “supposed to” like his characters most of the time, I don’t think, but it’s harder to gauge that with Updike, because on top of representing the malaise of a certain time in America (I’m really thinking more of Couples here but it applies to the Rabbit books too), and presenting us with characters who are overly self-absorbed about their lives and their so-called crises of whatever, the prose is doing the same thing, only it doesn’t feel intentional. It feels like “look how beautifully I write about these twerpy gutless people.”

Because this is the problem: Updike is not a bad writer. Patricia Cornwell, that is a bad writer. Misspellings, jerry-built plots, conceited characters, brutal dialogue — she’s just got no ear at all. Updike is a good writer, he has a very good ear, he’s obviously intelligent and wildly well-read, and I will say that I enjoyed his book of essays, much more than any of his fiction. He can’t resist showing off, still, usually, and whenever I’m reading an “On Books” column in The New Yorker and I come to phrase that the writer evidently worked on for several hours and made sure stayed in the graf even though it throws off the flow, I flip back to see who wrote the piece, and it’s almost always Updike. But from an execution standpoint, he has the goods. It’s not like these phrasings he’s so proud of actually suck.

And he’s far from the only writer who does this. If we’re talking New Yorker regulars, Gopnik was guilty of it in the first degree for years. I hated those cutesy pieces about his toddler interacting with Parisian culture or whatever the hell…it’s not that his prose didn’t work, and his writing in the last few years has knocked my eye out. He’s really good. It’s that, back then, you could almost hear him between the lines of some over-written pronunciamento about French children’s television, chuckling to himself about how firmly he’d nailed it.

Dave Eggers does it, Alice Sebold does it…it’s not a question of skill. It’s…well, you know, when people take the piss out of NPR, they always do it along the same axis: the voices of the announcers, that faintly amused, faintly smug hypnosis-session pitch they all use; and the somewhat rarefied “it’s funny because it’s obviously Ovid, not Horace!” tone of some of the stories, like, “Let’s do another fond-but-baffled piece on the kind of people who don’t go to college!” I love NPR, and they do good work there, but…you know what I’m talking about. It does verge on the cloistered at times.

Updike, kind of the same thing. I think he was genuinely surprised and hurt to find that John Cheever thought he was a twonk, and it’s not that Cheever was an A-plus human being, necessarily, himself. The difference between them, in my opinion, is that Cheever had a firmer grasp on the fact that you can be the best writer in the world and rule the bestseller lists and win the awards, and still 99 percent of the population isn’t going to give a shit — about that, about you, about how the work gets done or which parts of it you’re proud of. Not that it’s a requirement of becoming a writer that you get that; it’s probably better for your sanity if you don’t, and I think it tortured Cheever, actually, but I do think he looked at Updike and was like, that sentence about Rabbit Angstrom’s hair didn’t cure any cancer that I can see so why don’t you just bring it down about a dozen notches.

This is way longer than I’d intended; one more thing before I close, which is that I don’t think it’s “wrong” to like Updike and you can certainly disagree with my contentions. His fiction isn’t my taste, and this is why, but other people don’t find it bothersome, or even notice it, and that’s fine. Some people think Hemingway’s rhythms are unbearably affected; I think they’re devastatingly effective, but that’s just my taste.

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