JOHN Hoyer Updike, the much-awarded American writer, is famous for his satire, sequels and a prequel. His oeuvre consists of novels, collections of poems, short stories and essays. He has written a fair bit of literary criticism too.
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1932. The seeds of creativity were sown in him during childhood itself when he suffered from psoriasis and stammering. He fervently wanted to escape from the isolated farm where he lived as a child. This he did metaphorically by becoming a voracious reader. Among the writers he read were E.S. Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and P.G. Wodehouse. His mother encouraged him to write.
His first book, The Carpentered Hen And Other Tame Creatures, a collection of poems, appeared in 1958. Famous for the Rabbit series, his novels include Rabbit, Run , Couples, Rabbit Redux, Marry Me and The Witches of Eastwick. His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair , received much critical acclaim. The Centaur explores the relationship of a schoolmaster father with his son.
The Coup is a first-person narration by an ex-dictator of a fictitious African state. Of the Farm depicts a man agonizing over the choice between the past, represented by his mother, and the present in the form of his wife. In 2000, Updike’s prequel to Hamlet — Gretrude and Claudius — appeared, in which the central characters are the prince’s mother Queen Gertrude, her husband, and Claudius, her husband’s younger brother.
The Rabbit quartet traces the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, an athlete. The first novel tells the story of his youth as he pass through the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s. The sequels dwell upon the later stages of his life, leading to his final decline. The four novels draw attention to the American middle class subtopia’s angst. Updike mainly focuses on ordinary Americans caught in domestic dilemmas in the 1930s.
Characters like Rabbit’s wife Janice, the unrepentant adulteress, who Rabbit does not consider his intellectual equal even though she obviously is, Nelson, Rabbit’s drug-addicted son, and Angstrom himself, are not very sympathetic. The self-centered Rabbit finds himself wondering about "that strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves."
Updike, the essayist, pokes fun at American life and customs, in a good-natured sort of manner. He observes the ordinary life around him and prods us to take a fresh look at stereotypes and shed preconceived notions.
In The Bankrupt Man Updike turns upside-down how people normally think of an insolvent man by portraying a lifestyle that isn’t down in the dumps. As he says, "Being bankrupt is an expansionist process; it generates even new horizons." However, he can be scathing, too. For example, he describes England as a "soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe" (Picked Up Pieces). Or, "A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience". Hugging the Shore, a book of essays, depicts his flair for literary criticism.
Updike has shown interest in theology, too, but is he pious? He remarks in The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood that sex, art and religion are "the three great secret things" in human experience, while in A Month of Sundays he observes, "In general the churches, visited by me too often on weekdays`85 bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it".
Updike won the Pulitzer for Literature twice: for Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Among the other decorations are Guggenheim Fellow (1959), Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959), National Book Award in Fiction (1964), O. Henry Prize (1967-68), American Book Award (1982), and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (1982, 1990), and now the PEN/Faulkner Award for his short-stories collection The Early Stories.
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