Updike: Christian Chronicler

We belatedly offer a SWNIDish tribute to the man we had grown accustomed to calling our favorite living novelist, John Updike, who passed away about a week ago.

For those unfamiliar with Updike's typical (and prolific) work, we offer a few points of orientation. However the larger merits of his books will be judged in time, he is certainly among the most virtuosic writers of his era. Others may have attempted loftier themes, but few could match the sharpness of his narrative prose.

In many ways Updike seemed a self-conscious chronicler of his times. Certainly his novels focus on characters much like himself: male, American, aging, Eastern, conflicted. They pass through the events and trends of what seemed every year that passes in the second half of the last century and the first decade of this.

Updike is infamous for his explicit writing about sex. Some readers should probably take a pass on Updike for that very reason. And this little matter makes the next all the more surprising.

Updike was a serious-minded Christian, well informed on theology and biblical criticism, devoted to Christ and enthusiastically regular in church. Many of his novels and stories carry significant theological freight.

So how does all that come together? We'll offer our own view of it, unburdened by much reading of criticism of his work on this point. Updike's faith, we believe, led him to see significance in the ordinary, to be at once skeptical and optimistic about human nature and utterly devoted to describing it endlessly. Like the narrators of Israel's history, he gave us humanity in all its wonder and awfulness. That includes the sex.

So, where to start on Updike? The Rabbit novels are justly famous, but we'd recommend first the short story collection Pigeon Feathers, including especially the title story, an intensely moving and provocative meditation on childhood, death and God. In the Beauty of the Lilies is a later work that spans most of the twentieth century, spinning an intergenerational tale that illustrates Chesterton's maxim that the problem with atheism is not that people believe nothing but that they'll believe anything. For anyone who has been to seminary, that book's opening description of the Presbyterian minister's study at the turn of the century is so vivid that you can smell the books.