Thorn: Awards feed Updike's ego, angst

Published June 17, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Entertainment Columns & Blogs

When The New York Times Book Review recently named the most important works of American fiction of the past 25 years, topped by Toni Morrison's Beloved, some quibbled over the winner, others over the poll's methodology and even the usefulness of such an exercise.

John Updike would later question many of the same issues. But initially, he was busy - scanning the list for his name. When he finally spotted his "Rabbit" books at third place, he breathed a sigh of relief. But not for long.

"Sometime later," he tells me, slipping into second person, "you wonder why these other books came first."

You gotta love a man who has won nearly every prize the literary world has to offer and who can still angst like an insecure debutante. This was a man after my own heart, that most well-known of contradictory writer personalities: a mix of self-doubt and ego, all rolled into one endearing package.

"I feel awkward about any award," he says. "(These polls turn) literature into a kind of track meet, where you can judge first, second and third . . . I wonder if the discontent it breeds doesn't offset the joy of the winners."

I met Updike in a sterile convention hall room at the recent BookExpo America, the annual convention for the book industry, where he was promoting his new novel, Terrorist. He looks just as you'd expect from photos: snowy white hair, a face that's all angles, yet still somehow inviting. As a young reporter, Tom Wolfe once referred to Updike's "great thatchy medieval haircut" and his "Sherwin-Williams blush" - still perfect descriptions of the shy, quiet man sitting before me.

If ego necessarily comes with those who create, I see no evidence of arrogance. He answers every question graciously and expansively, if in a somewhat dispirited tone. That's no surprise, given the fact that he's just delivered an impassioned speech, lamenting another recent Times article predicting the demise of books as Internet technology takes over.

In the speech, he calls such a future a "grisly scenario." But a few hours later, he tempers his pessimism. "I'm not into dire predictions. I always take an optimistic view of most crises, personal and national. We'll work it out."

Still, when talking about this issue, he often swipes his hands over his face, as if extremely weary. He doesn't understand Internet culture, he says.

"You type in your blog, and some other people read it, and so you create a print society apart from real society and you're getting the gratification of expressing yourself . . . It's a way to develop a public persona, but it's very undiscriminating, and very 'me-minded.' We're all me-minded. We all have egos."

But writers in the past, such as Upton Sinclair, went beyond ego to serve a greater good, he says. "They were trying to improve the world . . . I get a feeling this electronic stuff is all kind of a game, another form of a video game."

If the Times' prophecy is right and the Internet replaces books, "I find it hard to imagine the world in this case. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination."

That would be a serious failure indeed. Updike's fertile imagination has powered more than 50 books, including story and essay collections and 22 novels, most notably the four featuring his famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, a man muddling his way through four decades of adult anxieties. Two of the Rabbit books received Pulitzer Prizes. Updike also has received the National Book Award for his novel, The Centaur, among other prizes.

His newest story takes his imagination to a place many of us have contemplated post-9/ll, though rarely in detail: the mind of a young terrorist. In this case, Updike follows an 18-year-old American, as he's drawn to radical Islamic beliefs and recruited as a suicide bomber.

The book was born the day he attended a child's birthday party in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. From the window, featuring an expansive view of downtown Manhattan, he saw smoke billowing from the Twin Towers.

"There were rivulets running down the grooves," Updike says of the towers. "There were a lot of vertical grooves, and these things fluttered down. Smoke poured through the sky - it was an utterly blue sky."

"Suddenly, the thing went down and we heard it. There was a kind of tinkling, a delicate sound, almost like wind chimes. I suppose it was all the glass shattering. Then, whooomp and dust covering the towers, and the whole island of Manhattan was wailing with sirens."

Later, he wrote a short story about the event, called Varieties of Religious Experience, in which one of the characters, he says, concludes, "There is no god; god wouldn't allow the building to collapse." The idea reflected his own despair, although "I've gotten over it. Life must go on. Belief must go on. But it went right through me like an arrow."

The story was rejected by The New Yorker, which felt it was too soon to open the wound. It was later published in Atlantic Monthly.

Updike eventually was moved to attempt a novel. Fascinated and horrified by the bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq, "I thought I'd try to imagine the mentality of those who find this a good thing to do, good in every way, virtuous . . . striking a blow for god to his enemies."

The result is a book that takes readers into the world of Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, a disaffected New Jersey teen who sees modern society as seedy and satanic, and turns to religion to find acceptance and purity. The novel is earning mixed reviews, although Updike's ambition at tackling such a difficult issue at age 74 has inspired widespread praise.

But if the author's aspirations are still great, he admits ideas don't come as easily as they once did. "I'm kind of running out of things to say. Every idea I get reminds me of another book I've written."

And he often lapses into nostalgia about his profession. Updike tends to talk about books the way music lovers spoke about albums just before CDs obliterated the format.

The author picks up a copy of Terrorist from the table in front of him, for example, and points out the cloth cover beneath the book jacket.

"The designer and I worked hard to find a cloth that had a little purple in it, to match the jacket. There used to be a rainbow of colors for cloth. Now it's down to basic black. This had to be ordered from Holland."

"I love the reading experience, holding a book, the way it looks . . . a book is a beautifully manufactured experience."

I ask if, after all these years, he's still excited when a new book of his comes off the presses. He acknowledges that changes in the business, including the need for more public appearances, have been discouraging.

"A book comes to my house every day," he says, noting that as a writer who also critiques books, publishers often send him new titles. "My dear wife finds it very aggravating - I used to watch my pennies, and I tend to keep my books. She says she used to revere books and admire writers . . . Now she finds that the whole hucksterism, the desperation, the attempt to get attention, turns her off."

"There's an awful lot of books published. The book industry's a little creaky. Maybe it was always a little creaky. People don't need books; most don't buy books; it's not like we've found a great way to make an egg beater, or something essential."

"(But) it's still thrilling to me, the way you throw these books out there and somebody picks it up at a library and writes you five years later. It's very gratifying . . . Now you go into elegant, luxurious houses and you don't see a book in sight, not one . . . But people like me need to produce them. So there you have it."

Updike notes that as a young child, he envisioned a creative life for himself. He liked the idea "of sitting quietly, making something that would get produced all over the state, something that emanated from me, that would assuage my religious fears, the fear of being forgotten, the fear of being ignored."

His position on The New York Times list of best works of American fiction should go a long way to putting those fears to rest. But you get the feeling Updike is his own worst critic. Has he met his own expectations?

Again, he offers a mix of certainty and self-doubt.

"I think I gave my talent a good outing . . . I wanted to try to write at the highest level. I pretty much called the shots, and any shortcoming is my own fault. I've read a lot of bad reviews (of my work); I know objections and faults can be found.

"(But) I'm pleased the world allowed me to have my say and continues to let me have my say."

A life in books

• Born John Hoyer Updike on March 18, 1932, and raised until age 13 in Shillington, Pa. His grandfather was a Presbyterian minister.

• Received scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in English. Had his first work published, a short story, in The New Yorker in 1954.

• Awards include National Book Award for The Centaur; two Pulitzer Prizes for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest; three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Hugging the Shores, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest; American National Book Award for Rabbit is Rich; 1998 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

• Has appeared twice on the cover of Time.

Patti Thorn is the books editor. thornp@RockyMountainNews.com 303-892-5419.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News