Rest in Peace, Updike

In my middle teens I lived with my father in a house on the Rio Grande in Embudo New Mexico. There was no computer and the small tv had very poor reception. The house was between the main highway leading to Taos and the river. It was far from everything. But the land is beautiful, and I would frequently run up the steep hills and search for arrowheads, or climb down into deep cracks in the volcanic rock.

At night I was restless. My stepmother would watch tv, or talk on the phone, or sometimes read books that instilled in me a very rare desire to burn books (one about neuro-linguistic programming comes to mind). My father would always seem very busy even when just sitting there reading. I could feel his mind working. They had already said goodbye to each other in some essential, unspoken way, and I responded by backing into myself, becoming a stranger. I took refuge in his wall of books. I would wade through shelves of linguistics and poetics books looking for something that would bring me a more immediate pleasure.

Updike's books, especially his short stories, were one of my ways out. I read all of my father's books of his, and looked for his name in the weekly New Yorker. His prose was poetic, but not self-consciously so. His writing was accessible, cosmopolitan, aware. He wrote with a great fluidity, a fluency in expressing his own thoughts. He wasn't interested in expressing complex ideas, and yet in the space of a couple of sentences, he can lead you somewhere and show you something beautiful that is absolutely brand new to your experience. And it's all done without showing the wires, ever. He had the lightest touch, as if the words were just flowing on out, like a clear stream runs down a hill. At least, this is how I felt when I read his work.

At the time I became aware of his writing, in the mid 1980s, the prevailing current in the short stories I came across tended toward a heavy handed, sparse intensity. Writers like Raymond Carver, that carved stories out of the bodies of people whose lives were bad and getting worse. Updike, who seemed immortal, showed a way to write that didn't rely on showing the great heart of the writer, as much as showing a very active estate of the mind.