Norman Mailer, in a breezy dismissal of Updike's novel Rabbit Run, called Updike the sort of writer who was popular with the mass of readers who knew nothing about writing. Mailer's withering glare, though, was notably fueled with obvious envy (brilliant as he was, the late writer was always obsessed with his literary competition), and what the departed Updike leaves behind is one of the most impressive bodies of work a contemporary writer, American or otherwise, would want for a legacy. His Rabbit quartet of novels--Rabbit Run,Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit is Rich--is among the peerless accomplishments of 20th century fiction in it's chronicle of living through the confusion of the Viet Nam war, feminism, civil rights and the sexual revolution in the person of the series' titulat character, Rabbit Angstrom. Not deep of thought but rich in resentment, Angstrom was an analog of American culture itself, a congested vein of self seeking that never recovered from the raw sensation of youthful vigor; Angstrom, like the country itself, resentfully fumbled about for years ruing the loss of vitality and trying to replace it with new things, the crabby possessiveness of the middle class.

Updike had been criticized, as had Nabokov , for creating characters who weren't sufficiently heroic in their suffering or sympathetic to any degree, a charge I considered a dodge against the dicier matters of personality Updike was fascinated by and lovingly detailed with his poetically charged sentences. The seduction and allure of Updike's prose was the lush and bittersweet tone he could manage while following the curious circles of sense seeking his creations walked in--within any scene, whether a room, a church, a middle class home decorated in conflicting schools of tackiness, there would be an order things established, material goods contrasted against modified and enhanced surroundings that would offer up a vivid sense of how intoxicating, self convincing a character's thought process can be.

Updike, though, didn't trust perfect scenarios or theories as to the meaning of life, and was well aware of the human quirk that seems compelled to foul the nest with self-seeking. Comic, cruel, resonating with moments that are suddenly enlarged beyond the inane doings of his sweetly deluded antagonists, Updike was the voice of the problematic white straight male libido. Everything was sex drive--love, business, politics--and that realization alone is likely what gave Updike so much material to write books about, captured in an unequaled six decades of novels, short story collections, plays, and essay collections. If a writer's task is, among others, to help us understand the actions that causes us to fall down and act badly dispite our best intentions, Updike has performed a patriotic service. There should be some prize for that.

What was adolescence like? How did you survive/escape a bad early marriage? What was it like to not fulfill early promise? How did you love your mate and hate her at once? A child stuffs a mouth with a napkin at the announcement of their parents' imminent break-up; a car accident leaves a taste of metal in the mouth. In Football Season, a hearse passes by, leaving a shadow of mortality.

There was none better than Updike to inform and remind us of the power of living and absorbing the present moment: with reverence, humor and infinite attention to what matters, he woke the reader to life. And, at the end of Rabbit at Rest, he sent -- for me at least -- the best and most perfectly imagined sense of what death will be like.

Lipsky wonders who was listening to these literary notes fluttering from the Music School: I was.

I won't claim authorship of this idea but if you put together Updike's Rabbit series all together as one piece, they are in fact the long-awaited Great American Novel.

Thank you.

Here's a nice quote from an obit in the NYT:

As he told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight: “Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Oh - and I loved the Norman Mailer quote above: "(he) called Updike the sort of writer who was popular with the mass of readers who knew nothing about writing." No, that's right, most readers know about reading. Why should they know about writing? I hate the fashin for everyone being 'in the trade' and judging and talking from that point of view. Movie goers should judge a movie on how great it was to watch, readers should judge books on how great they are to read, and so on. John Updike gave great reading.

It's been a struggle to finish any Updike novel, and I've tried various ones. The piling up of monotonous details in monotonous lives continually in flux but never really changing: it doesn't hold my interest.

That point about the high school yearbook editor who excelled is exactly right. He writes as a mid-twentieth high school English teacher would want students to write. But having accurately described his talent, why go on to praise it in such a "there were giants then" fashion? His writing represented what was worst about the New Yorker, rather than what was best: an anonymously "well-crafted" style with no highs or lows, only a fairly tolerable middle ground.

I'm not a huge Mailer fan, but it's pretty easy to figure out why Mailer trashed Rabbit Run without bringing in issues of jealousy. Mailer is the exempler of the large gesture, the grasp for something higher, the push to go beyond. He was never satisfied, and often as not he fell on his face. But he really did strive. He attempted to climb mountains. There is no way he was going to appreciate Updike's tempered, restricted vision.

Updike sold well throughout his life, but I've never figured out who his audience is. I don't think I know anyone who reads him. He's the kind of author I expect Mrs. Robinson kept on her bookshelf.