Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850 and
set in the Puritan township that was 17th-century Boston, could be said to
stand as one of the cornerstones of American literature. It is the story of
Hester Prynne, made to wear a scarlet A sewn to her garments to mark her out
always as an adulterer.
“Let her cover the mark as she will,” one of the gossips of the town says,
“the pang of it will be always in her heart.” Hester’s husband, Roger
Chillingworth, is thought to have died but watches her malevolently and
watches too the Rev Arthur Dimmesdale, the tormented minister he believes to
be the father of the child conceived in his absence, the sprite-like Pearl.
It would be fair to say that the same pang was in John Updike’s heart. It is
no coincidence that this modern master of American literature returned to
Hawthorne’s novel more than once in his remarkable career. In 1975 there was A
Month of Sundays, its randy clergyman protagonist an answer to
Hawthorne’s hypocritical Dimmesdale. A little more than ten years later
there was Roger’s Version – this time a contemporary take on The
Scarlet Letter is told from the point of view of Roger Lambert, a
divinity professor who mirrors Chillingworth. In 1988 came S., an
epistolary novel whose heroine, Sarah Worth, was his modern-day Hester.
These are lesser-known works in comparison with the four novels that
chronicled the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school
basketball star whose story captured its author for three decades. The first
novel in the sequence, Rabbit, Run, appeared in 1960; the fourth, Rabbit
at Rest, in 1990 – winning its author the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Critics’ Circle award, just as its predecessor, Rabbit
is Rich, had in 1980. (Updike never won the Nobel Prize; he did,
however, award one to his character Henry Bech in 1999).
Yet the parallels with Hawthorne are still there, with the author as
chronicler of the way in which human relationships can never be made to run
along the rules society dictates.
“The tetralogy to me is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen
who shares the national passion for youth, freedom and sex, the national
openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation,”
Updike once wrote. “He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose
manifestations are elusive, yet all-important.” Those elusive manifestations
speak to Hawthorne, too.
Updike was – like Philip Roth, of whom he was almost an exact contemporary – a
novelist of the sexual revolution. When Couples was published, in
1968, Time magazine put him on the cover with the headline “The
Adulterous Society”. Couples is set in the fictional suburb of
Tarbox – its exiles from the city perhaps another echo of those Puritans who
fled the Old World for the New and found, well, not exactly what they were
expecting to find, who discovered that some dissatisfactions cannot be run
from.
Whether the reader thinks his frank style is tongue-in-cheek, rococo or simply
always in contention for a Bad Sex Award depends on your perspective but
Updike was in the vanguard of writers who kicked down the door of American
bedrooms everywhere. He was seductive simply as a writer, his beautiful
prose always a caress. That caress was never merely physical: over the
course of his career his novels took in the wider political events of his
time as well as the personal – the Vietnam War, the oil crisis and the fall
of Sky-lab in 1979 – which seemed to signal some larger American failing.
And he was, too, a master of that form too often ignored, or largely so on
these shores: the short story.
No writer is, of course, to every reader’s taste and Updike had his
detractors, to be sure. The late David Foster Wallace was excoriating in his
scorn of Updike when he reviewed Toward the End of Time in 1997,
calling him (along with Roth and Mailer) one of the last “great male
narcissists”.
“No US novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike,”
Foster Wallace wrote, “whose rise in the 60s and 70s established him as both
chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation
since Louis XIV.”
Foster Wallace was from a different generation of writers and whether or not
one agrees with the grouping of Roth, Updike and Mailer in the
great-male-narcissist category, one can argue that the current generation of
novelists sees the world in a more fragmented, more ironic, less
all-encompassing way than Updike did.
His passing causes one to ask: so who, now, is the Great American Novelist if
we discount those of his peer group who are with us still? Does the
definition still apply? Time can only tell. And yet it’s hard to imagine
seeing the career of, say, Jonathan Safran Foer in the same light as we now
see Updike’s. But that is as much true of the world as a whole as it is true
of writers individually. Everyone, everything, seems more uncertain than
when Updike began.
Yet why would that be? Let us say, now he is gone, that it is at least in part
because of John Updike, who mapped our desires, our wishes, our wise and
unwise dreams, our uncertainties, with such elegant precision and for so
many years.
American literature was marked and measured by Hawthorne, indeed. And then by
Updike in his turn.
Rabbit tales: a selected readers’ guide
Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at
Rest (1990) One of the most famous tetralogies in publishing history
charts the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, whose promise as a high-school
basketball star has long since waned. He is haunted by regrets about the
life he could have had and is unable to escape dysfunctional family life
even in his retirement. The last two books won Pulitzer Prizes
Couples (1968) This exposé of the sexual liberation of suburban America
tells the story of ten households from Tarbox, New England, as they try to
reconcile their desires with their respectable lives. Its depiction of
adultery and sex as an “emergent religion” rattled traditionalists
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)The decline of religion and its
replacement by materialism is explored across four generations of the Wilmot
family, beginning at the turn of the 20th century. It begins with a minister
losing his faith, which has profound consequences for his descendants and
their ability to find happiness
The Witches of Eastwick (1984) This novel about three 20th-century
sorceresses brought Updike’s name to a new audience when it became a
successful film starring Jack Nicholson as the Devil and Cher, Susan
Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as single women who accidentally invite him
to their town
