Living legend
John Updike speaks to, and writes for the next American generation

By Ryan Alan
Philly EDGE Correspondent

Were he to let it, the mantle of responsibility and expectation could weigh heavily on Reading native John Updike.
Being referred to, as he has been, as among the candidates for the title of “the world’s greatest living writer,” could have a way of doing that.
Having been honored with not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, might put him in that frame of mind. Being told that he has indeed written the illusive “Great American Novel” with his four-book chronicle of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s life through the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s could also be the catalyst.
And that doesn’t even include receiving the National Medal for Humanities at the White House, joining a select group of people who have been honored with both it and the National Medal of Art.
And there is the National Book Award, the O. Henry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award and twice making the cover of Time, a magazine that praises his prose as “the literary equivalent of high-definition television.”
If the acclaimed novelist, short story writer and poet is silently thinking “Enough already!,” he is gentlemanly enough not to voice it during an early morning conversation from his hotel suite high above Chicago.
He is in The Windy City to attend a book fair, and to remind more people that, at 74, and after millions of words, his pen is not dry yet. His surprising new (and 22nd overall) novel, Terrorist, set in a fading New Jersey town in view of the New York City skyline, is drawing very positive reviews as a thriller.
“It deserves the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism,” writes Booklist. “Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike’s career.”
Kirkus Reviews hails it as a “remarkable detour….The septuagenarian master has crafted a killer of a page-turner, complete with Islamic extremists, a terrorist plot and a race by a world weary protagonist to save the day. It’s gripping, provocative and frequently funny; it’s a blast watching Updike work so enthusiastically in this territory,” it adds.
Reviewer Harriet Klausner says that Updike is at his best with this frighteningly intense thriller in which he makes it clear that social strata and economics make for breeding grounds of terrorists here, in Iraq and elsewhere.
Updike, who now lives in Massachusetts, seems energized and appreciative.
“I’m pleased to be alive at 74 and still be writing and still fairly healthy,” he says. “I’m pleased to look at that back shelf of books. When I was a young man hoping to become a writer, I never thought I would publish so much. I look back with some pleasure and satisfaction. On the other hand, you always wonder if it is good enough, could I make it better, or make this book better?”
And, about all those awards and honors?
“I wouldn’t want to return any of them. I’m grateful for the recognition, but I try not to take it too seriously,” he replies. Writing is not like a track meet where one guy clearly jumps higher than the others, he assures. “It’s a very subjective thing.”
He and his colleagues are fortunate to have been born into a rich country that can support some writers – though “not a tremendous number” – he says.
He is hopeful that in his career so far he has captured a sense of real American life.
“I’ve taken that as a mission to lie low in America and not set myself up as a priest or celebrity or a high liver,” he explains. “I try to show the conflicts and tragedies and unexpected rewards of ordinary life.”
He is thinking of his short stories here, he adds, as much as his novels. Short stories have to be more authentic by their very nature, he explains.
“You can’t really stray too much from the actual texture of daily life. In novels, you’re entitled to fantasize. Always what matters to me is the feeling of having, in a paragraph or a page, caught something actual.”
For Updike, that is not an infrequent achievement.
“The people who populate his stories are excruciatingly real, and I think talented writers and close readers, though some may not like the people he portrays, recognize his talent and the need to speak honestly about who we are as human beings,” says East Coast independent book store owner Tom Holbrook.
“I think that many people have resonated with his characters and their pursuit of money, sex, happiness and meaning,” adds Patricia Lynch, who oversees a visiting writers series in the East. “I have heard Mr. Updike referred to as a dean in American Letters and I think that shows the respect he has earned from the literary world. Just recently the New York Times pulled out the most influential books of the last 25 years and Mr. Updike’s work was prominently featured.”
Holbrook believes Updike’s short stories have been particularly influential.
“You often hear people describe a piece of short fiction as having a New Yorker feel. Some people don’t like this, many do; but my point is that as a contributor to that magazine for nearly five decades, Updike has had an enormous influence on how authors write,” he explains. “The fact that he is still living and active makes him even more influential because he is able to comment directly or through his current work on the past half-century of culture, and does so with book reviews, art reviews and other essays as well as through his fiction.”
The author immediately comes to mind in any discussion of who the greatest living American icons of writing are, he adds.
In maintaining such respect, Updike works hard to keep people intrigued, as he has done with Terrorist.
“I try to make each new project a bit of a departure. That’s especially true with the novels. This novel, for example, does have a thriller element and does take place in northern New Jersey, an area I’ve never actually lived in. For me, this book is a bit of an adventure. Unless a book is exciting and challenging to the author, there’s not too much for the reader,” he said.
With Terrorist, he wanted to reflect the current societal mindset, “the kind of fear and anxiety and stress we all more or less partake of with this conflict with Islamic extremists,” he said. He cites a “kind of low grade fever of pain that runs through the headlines.” And he picked up the day’s New York Times to read some examples, including “this revelation in Canada of a bunch of more or less homegrown terrorists.”
His new novel, he explains, is his take on an American homegrown terrorist – “an idealistic, likable man.”
It is the story of 18-year-old Ahmad, whose devotion to Allah and the sacred words of the Qur’an, as revealed to him by the local imam, leads him to commit himself to an act of terror. Born of an Irish-American mother still searching through sensuous pleasures for her own fulfillment, and an Egyptian father long since disappeared, Ahmad craves spiritual nurture and regards so contemptuously the self-indulgent society he sees around him that the call to self-sacrifice seems a blessing.
Neither the world-weary, though well-intentioned, guidance counselor at his high school, nor the mischievously seductive classmate Joryleene succeeds in deflecting Ahmad from his determination. Inevitably, perhaps, he is drawn into an insidious plot.
Updike says he wanted to offer a portrait of a terrorist, showing how a young man could be led into this kind of fanaticism.
“He has a certain grace that others are attracted to, and he is serious about life. He is trying to find something to believe in and look beyond the material world around him to hold on to something else,” he says. “He is not unique in this. You can say the same for Rabbit Angstrom in a less organized and institutionalized way.”
He reminded that 1960’s Rabbit, Run described a certain kind of American predicament, a high school athlete with nowhere to go once he graduates.
“It took on aspects of the American Everyman,” he says.
The author agreed that Terrorist could be a warning of sorts.
“I’m really saying that unless this country offers its young people more than TV celebrity gossip, we are apt to get people turning in a search for seriousness and real purpose, and some could be attracted to a fight against (such shallowness),” he says.
He laments “a kind of despair” that he sees in some young people. “It’s not just terrorism. The teens in Columbine murdering their classmates shows how much people need to feel useful and purposeful,” he says.
Updike insists that he is not anti-American.
“I’m fairly conservative and patriotic. But I can see the society as a whole leaves too many people out.”
Having said that, he retains optimism that there is reason for hope.
“I have a great faith in the resilience of human beings to learn new tricks.”

Writing 101: Lessons for new writers from Updike

What might a new writer learn from John Updike’s career so far?
The answer is not a simple one, implies Updike.
“New writers don’t face the conditions I did. I became a young writer when print was much more important and writers were more celebrities,” he says. There is no modern Hemingway, he says.
“I do feel something has gone out of print as a glamorous medium,” he laments.
Then he poses his own question: “Do young people read in leisure time the way I did?... Picking up a book was a happy, anticipatory feeling. It’s not all I did. I did read escapist stuff. But now I don’t think they do. I look at my own children. If you don’t read before the age of 18, I don’t know if you will.”
Still, he implies that new writers should not be discouraged.
He speaks of trying to capture the reading interest of young people and others as “a worthwhile challenge.” “In my view, the written word does explore issues with thoroughness,” he adds.
He advises new writers to have diligence and not to let themselves become too easily discouraged.
“Enjoy the process, the daily work and counting on each day to bring a certain number of additional words. And, otherwise try to be a normal person who enjoys life. Live it and don’t become too intense and self-conscious about the writer’s role.” He remains motivated to continue doing what he is doing. “It’s a habit for one thing. I’ve spent most of my adult life writing something every morning,” he says. “I try meeting my own quotas and I still have a certain amount of competitive instinct, I suppose.”
And there’s this benefit, too:
“Being a freelance writer is one thing they can’t retire you from. You retire yourself.”
He hopes that he has something “still to say left unsaid….And there’s a certain pleasure still in conjuring your thoughts out of air onto paper and seeing them go into print that never fails to excite me.”

-Ryan Alan

Excerpt from Terrorist: One night in New Jersey:

“Her little red miniskirt, smaller than a cheerleader’s, allows him to see her thighs, spread fat from the pressure of the mattress edge. He thinks of only her underpants coming between her bare bottom and the fancy ticking; the thought constricts his throat.
“…(She) puts her hands on each of his buttocks through the black jeans and by pulling him rhythmically into her pushing softness draws him up and up into a convulsive transformation…perhaps that which occurs when the soul passes at death into Paradise.”

Summer reading list

We asked several bookstores in the region which books are most popular with Philly EDGE-type readers (that is when they’re not drinking heavily, spending money frivolously or surfing for porn endlessly):

Ardmore Paperback Book Shop, 14 W Lancaster Ave. Ardmore
-Daniel Salsburg, bookseller

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger; Philadelphia Then and Now by Edward Arthur Mauger; His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis

Doylestown Bookshop, 16 S. Main St., Doylestown
-Shilough Hopwood, book buyer

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz-Zafon; The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger (“popular again since the movie came out”); Terrorist by John Updike; anything by James Patterson; Marley and Me by John Grogan; History of Love by Nicole Krauss (“has been a bit of a sleeper hit”); Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

Newtown Book and Record Exchange, 102 S. State Street, Newtown
Customers look for authors, not titles

Harlan Coben, John Connolly, Michael Connelly, Michael Crichton, Nelson DeMille, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich

Barnes & Noble, Knapp Rd., North Wales
-Dennis Murray, manager

12 Sharp by Janet Evanovich; Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards has been a “huge word of mouth bestseller” for the past few weeks.

Barnes & Noble, 210 Commerce Blvd. Fairless Hills

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger; Marley and Me by John Grogan; The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; 12 Sharp by Janet Evanovich.

Micawber Books, 114 Nassau St. Princeton, NJ
(waiting for call back)

Barnes & Noble, 835 Old York Road, Jenkintown

12 Sharp by Janet Evanovich ; Beach Road by James Patterson, Peter de Jonge;
The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Barnes & Noble, 102 Park Ave. Willow Grove

Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter; 12 Sharp by Janet Evanovich ; Beach Road by James Patterson, Peter de Jonge