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Reading between the lines.

The Examined, and Exhibited, Life

Updike was the consummate stylist with a blogger mentality.

By Brad LeithauserUpdated Monday, June 8, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET

John Updike's My Father's Tears.With intimidating steadiness, right up until his death last January, John Updike went on doing what he'd done from the outset: He wrote and published, wrote and published. He wrested a first acceptance from The New Yorker in the summer he graduated from Harvard in 1954 and had released his first book, a collection of poetry, by 1958. Most subsequent years saw a new Updike volume and sometimes two. In the five months since he died, we've had two posthumous collections: Endpoint and Other Poems, issued in March, which served as a bookend to Midpoint and Other Poems (1969), and now My Father's Tears and Other Stories.

It has become almost a cliché to marvel over Updike's adherence to Henry James's dictum that the writer should be "one of the people on whom nothing is lost." For Updike, no meaningful experience went unrecorded and unpublished, ingeniously translated into fiction or verse. Over time, loyal readers began to feel a companionable connectedness not merely with his writing but with his much-photographed life. (He appeared on the cover of a number of his dust jackets.) You felt you knew his comings and goings, whether geographical or emotional, with a thoroughness usually reserved for your closest friends. This peculiar sense of familiarity surely goes a long way in explaining the extraordinary national outpouring of grief and admiration in the wake of his death.

Among American writers of his generation, Updike was unusual in his comprehensive effort to get the entirety of his life into his fiction. He certainly stands apart from Truman Capote, or Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth, or Joyce Carol Oates, or Anne Tyler—all of whose birthdates lie within 10 years of his. Yet a strange thing happened during his last decade: A different generation caught up with him. Updike seems less unusual when set beside a newer and typically much younger group of American writers: bloggers. Among them, too, we often witness an impulse to throw the whole of one's life onto the page—or the computer screen.

This shift may be less a result of changing sensibilities than a simple change in technologies. Updike was privileged—deservedly so. There weren't many writers of his generation granted what was essentially carte blanche to fill row after row of New Yorker columns, or page after page of Knopf books, with whatever pleased them. Many bloggers, on the other hand, have no editorial team they must win over before their work materializes. What was once a rare privilege is now a common right.

A story like "Morocco," which opens My Father's Tears, has some kinship with the sort of vacation blogs you'll find on the Internet. The story—one of the book's weakest—feels reportorial and autobiographical, an attempt to salvage, by way of entertainment, an exotic family vacation beset by minor difficulties and disappointments (chilly weather, currency problems, mazelike streets).

Still, the difference between an Updike and a would-be Updike is of course immense and immediately felt. You experience it at the most basic, sentence-by-sentence level. Updike was the master of an effortless elaborateness that allowed him to express great subtlety—of nuance, of thought—without losing an impression of lucidity. He is one of those rare writers whom you never want to read without a pencil in hand, ever alert to the prickling possibility, even where a story or novel or poem seems to be flagging, that you will soon meet some verbal aptness that calls out to be noted now and pondered later.

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There's an early example near the end of "The Happiest I've Been," which concluded his first collection of stories, The Same Door (1959). The narrator and his high school friend have begun a long dawn drive across snowy Pennsylvania, and the friend lights a cigarette: "A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh." The sentence is nothing more than an elaboration of the story's title, but with the heavy, rasping rhyme of "scratch" and "match," the somewhat grandiose "diminution," and the way in which this suddenly magical drive promises to come bumping back down to earth with the approaching lights and clangor of Pittsburgh, Updike effects a stunning conjunction of the lyrical and quotidian. He was 26 when this story was first published.

And for another half-century he went on producing sentences as fine and fertile as this one. I felt a similar thrill, reading My Father's Tears, when I came upon this:

He gasped for breath, doggy-paddling back to the dock, and from this lower perspective saw the trees all around as the sides of a golden well, an encirclement holding him at the center of the circumscribed sky.

And this:

Except for her bust, abruptly outthrust in the eight grade, her physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness.

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Brad Leithauser is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His new novel, The Art Student's War, will be published in November.
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