After admiring so many of John Updike’s short stories and essays I’m reading his famous novel Rabbit, Run.  It’s something entirely different.  In shorter form Updike is masterfully concise, using language in quick, knife-like strokes to make a point or set a mood.  He simply never misses – each meticulously crafted phrase lands exactly where it needs to.  The novel, in contrast, is stupendously overwritten.  Updike has widened his scope and also inflated his language.  At first I was disappointed, since I wanted to wade through two hundred pages of the lean, practically skeletal prose of his short stories.  But I’ve been won over by the dense, twisting paragraphs in Rabbit, Run, which are fattened with layers of details and descriptions.  There’s in them a deep desire, I think, to capture everything – literally, each single thing – that is seen, experienced and observed, and to put it into language.

I’ve always been smitten by Updike’s unapologetically bourgeois persona.  In photos as a young man he’s lean and awkward-looking, the striving scholarship boy who went to Harvard.  And in photos as an older man (he died in 2009) he’s white-haired and professorial, a literary icon.  But he doesn’t seem to change.  Throughout his life he seems to have maintained the same good spirits, the same build, and the same preppy (without a twist) way of dressing.  There’s none of the bluster of Mailer, torment of Cheever, or emotionalism of Roth.  Updike wrote with avant-garde brio under the guise of absolute normalcy.  I like this notion of the writer as a person who simply gets up every morning and writes.  And I like this photo of Updike, from 1960, the same year Rabbit, Run was published, very much.  He’s got the suit, tie and brush cut of an insurance salesman (or should I say, a vegetable-peeler salesman), but poses with a cockily tilted cigarette and a deep, true smile.  You get a sense that he’s an ordinary man and also a sensualist, reaching for everything possible both in experience and in language.