Updike: America’s Man of Letters, by William H. Pritchard, studies the boundless writing of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike. As Pritchard states in his introduction, this book is not a biography, but a scholarly discussion of Updike’s writing –- no small task, considering Updike’s never-ending canon.From Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to Rabbit at Rest, William Pritchard professionally and insightfully discusses John Updike’s words as a novelist, poet, and reviewer. Some critics are turned off or intimidated by Updike’s perpetual authorship - “Has the son of bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” - but Pritchard is not daunted; he delves in, enjoying the boundless depths of Updike’s prose.
Literary critic Sven Birkerts suggests that Updike should “yield [his] crown to a younger generation,” and other mislead literati view Updike as narcissistic and uninterested in societal issues. William H. Pritchard disagrees. He heralds John Updike as America’s premier man of letters and defends his present-day credibility: “the unfolding of that self [Updike] has been the unfolding of a society and a nation –- America in the second half of our Century.” As Updike meticulously examines himself and his surroundings, he meticulously examines our world.
Fellow novelist Philip Roth said, “Updike knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America. I don’t know anything about anything.” I agree with the first half of Roth’s opinion, for Updike has astutely broached innumerable subjects and has turned mundane objects [storm windows, underwear, sash cords] into textual art. Pritchard praises Updike’s everyman intellect and textual prolificacy; Updike “has given us, from the beginning to now, sentences unsurpassed in their witty, rhythmic, intelligently turned and tuned performance.”
Exhibiting a style reflective of Updike’s, Pritchard also offers a well-tuned performance; his writing is descriptively rich, fastidiously constructed, and dense with analytical content. He even gets a little carried away, as Updike sometimes does: “as A Month of Sundays aspires to say something about the ‘human condition,’ it risks obfuscating any such saying by its overbearing, twitching, linguistic antennae.” With his own over-the-top descriptiveness, Pritchard accurately mimics Updike’s occasional overarticulation. Pritchard and Updike’s erudition intermittently spawns stylistic superfluity (it could be catching).
With his articulate language, Pritchard offers concise synopses of Updike’s books, provides well-selected quotations, and then insightfully deconstructs the quotes selected. He also discusses many of Updike’s recurring themes, like religion and sexual transgression. Of course, It would be hard to ignore the latter; an Updike character once said, “We are an adulterous generation; let us rejoice.”
One of my favorite Pritchard selections is from Toward the End of Time, a futuristic novel set in 2020; Updike describes teenagers in a shopping mall:
Young couples, tattooed and punctured visibly and invisibly, with studiously brutal haircuts, strolled hand in hand as if in a garish park of the purely unnatural, so deeply at home here it would not have surprised me if, with a clash of nostril studs and a spattering of hair dye, boy and girl had turned and begun to copulate.Pritchard views this scene as an “Updike-inspired satiric vignette, strongly tinged with disgust.” I see it as an accurate portrayal, not of 2020, but of now -- an honest view of mall-rats hormonally rebelling against societal restrictions with devil-may-care attitudes, right of passage body piercing, and bad hair. Even though this passage is tame for Updike, some critics still say that it pushes the envelope of perversity; in reality, however, all Updike does is tell the truth.
Through the years, John Updike has perpetually taken the high road; “He has never deviated from his conviction that we were put in this world to give praise and pay attention.” William Pritchard has also paid attention, and his perceptive reading of Updike’s words has created perceptive writing worthy of Updike’s name.
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*Originally published in the Charleston City Paper
