Guest Mediaculture

Late at night on Jan. 26, I was reading The Widows of Eastwick. The next day I learned that the author of that novel, John Updike, had died. His death felt like losing a college friend with whom one made an annual contact, a good neighbor who came to see us once a year.

One of our children bought me a copy of Widows for Christmas. An Updike book was often a Christmas gift, an easy choice, since he turned out at least one book a year—all told more than 50 books, which included 28 novels; other titles included 13 short story collections, 10 poetry volumes and assorted collections of his prose.

Part of Updike’s appeal for me and others my age was that we read him as young people in the 1960s and aged with him. He wrote of high school romance, young married-life choices, midlife angst and the regrets of older years. His most awarded four books, the Rabbit novels, have Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dying at age 56. Death was never far away, even in youth.

Religiously, Updike was appealing because he also had the hope of the resurrection. A confessing Christian, he imbibed the Lutheranism of his youth, read the theologian Karl Barth as a young adult and remained an orthodox C.S. Lewis-type Christian to the end. Although he seldom wrote extensively of his Christian beliefs, his characters and narrators were often religiously articulate.

We meet the discredited (somewhat mad) minister in A Month of Sundays, the young evangelical graduate student in Roger’s Version, the Unitarian minister Brenda Parsley in The Witches of Eastwick. Where else could you meet a Unitarian minister preaching on personal and original sin? Although his characters sinned badly, one had the feeling the narrator regretted their losses.

Updike wrote of sex, and many of us got started on Updike because he was one of the most explicit writers of sex of our generation. He was the Song of Songs poet for Baby Boomers and their social revolution. He shared the Hebraic writers’ gender and generally presented a male’s perspective, though not always.

In an epoch when writers and our imagination became fascinated with the minority experience—talented Jews, exotic immigrants and Latin American revolutionaries—Updike found inspiration in our suburbs, in the domesticity of the split-level house. While most writers pursued the heroic and the absurd, Updike described the seasons, such as the fall, in The Witches of Eastwick: “There comes a blessed moment in the year when we know we are mowing the lawn for the last time.”

People of the Pennsylvania farmlands, where he was born in 1932, and the Northeastern suburbs, where he lived most of his adult life, populate his stories—though he occasionally wrote about other characters, such as a deposed African dictator in The Coup or a young Muslim in The Terrorist. Both he treated sympathetically.

He seemed like one of our friendly non-Mennonite neighbors, having grown up in Shillington, south of Reading, Pa. His Rabbit novels are set in that countryside. In his Pennsylvania stories one may meet a Mennonite doctor or visit a conservative Mennonite-owned store. Sometimes Amish appear in a story or poem.

Updike described more than he disturbed. Although vaguely liberal in his politics, he never seemed to need to carry his politics on his sleeve, much as he did not do this regarding his Christian beliefs. He remained civil, decent, ironic and mannerly.

He went to work every day and wrote a book—fiction (novel or short stories), poetry or criticism—each year. If he and we sinned, he seemed to regret it and went to church every Sunday; a generous God was still around. In an age of suicide bombers and tales sold by Amazon, full of sound and fury, he ended his last book with two of the three 70-year-old widows still standing, still working and planning another vacation. One can think of worse neighbors.

Levi Miller is director of Herald Press in Scottdale, Pa.