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Middle-Class Mores Permeate Updike's Work

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Los Angeles Times

Published: January 28, 2009

John Updike, 76, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed an undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died Tuesday of lung cancer in a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, as well as collections of poetry.

In recent years, he was best known for his art criticism and essays. His last published piece was a review of Toni Morrison's novel "A Mercy" in the Nov. 3 issue of the New Yorker.

Two of Updike's most memorable characters, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and Henry Bech, became emblems of the displaced American male that fascinated him as a writer.

Angstrom, a man he often referred to as his alter-ego, is the disenchanted middle-class drifter in Updike's four-book series about "Rabbit."

Bech is the Jewish-American novelist, breaking away from his cultural roots and immigrant heritage to become a fully assimilated American. Each in his own way reflects Updike's major themes.

Early in his career, Updike said he wrote most often about the world he came from, "the American Protestant small-town middle class," as he described it in a 1966 interview with Life magazine. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a small-town Pennsylvania boy who grew into a high school basketball star. He married young, quickly found adult life disappointing, left his wife and young son, and set off alone.

Three more novels about Angstrom followed: "Rabbit Redux" in 1971, "Rabbit Is Rich" in 1981 and "Rabbit at Rest" in 1990. The last two in the series each won a Pulitzer, and "Rabbit Is Rich" won the American Book Award and National Book Award.

As Rabbit muddled through the collapse of established sexual mores, the rise of the technological age and the beginnings of globalization, he became a "purposely representative" American male, Updike explained in "Self-Consciousness," his 1989 memoir. He referred to Rabbit as his alter-ego.

Most of Updike's short stories appeared first in the New Yorker, where he was briefly a staff writer and, for decades, a regular contributor.

His first novel, "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959), published when he was 27, is about senior citizens in a retirement home, cut off from the world except during their annual fair. Updike referred to the book as an example of his "shadowy vision" of adult life.

Several of Updike's novels were made into movies. "The Witches of Eastwick," where realism spins off into fantasy, shows what happens when bored suburban women capable of witchery meet one devilish man.

John Hoyer Updike was born in Shillington, a suburb of Reading, Pa., on March 18, 1932. He was a gawky, sickly child who had a stammer, asthma and psoriasis, which he describes in meticulous detail in "Self-Consciousness."

Through high school, he was more interested in drawing and painting than writing. He attended Harvard University, where he was a cartoonist for the Harvard Lampoon.

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