In addition to publishing award-winning novels and some of the most wondrous short stories of the past half-century, John Updike has also been one of America’s most prolific and engaging critics. Since the early 1960s, Updike has turned out two volumes of art criticism and another six of assorted nonfiction—some 5,000 pages of his thoughts on everything from cars to books to the value of owning art. Due Considerations, his sixth volume of assorted criticism, has just landed in stores.
Time being finite, and since you seem to think of yourself as a novelist, why review at all anymore?
Maybe I’m scared of what would happen if I had nothing to write but fiction, and I am scared of not ever again being in The New Yorker. It gives me a sense of meaningful contact to review for them, to have the exchange of proofs. I am too much of a professional to want to be locked in entirely with one novel after another. Roth does it that way; Styron did it. I like the mix.
You used to review your contemporaries—like Philip Roth—but the American section in this book is quite thin. Are you asking for different books?
I have never been totally comfortable reviewing peers—I feel a little bit guilty for the lukewarm reviews to writers I know and admire, so I am happy to have few Americans sent my way. It’s always easier to be the guy reviewing the new Eastern European novel or some avant-garde play—that was my specialty in the days that I had one. I was one of the only ones willing to read these books and people like that, and that was fun. I was relieved of any rivalry, and I thought not entirely falsely they might teach me something new, and they did.
In addition to reviews, this new book contains a few travel pieces. I liked your description of coming back from China to your own house and waking up in the night suddenly alienated by it.
Travel, like reading other people’s fiction, is a little frightening; you don’t want to know how much exists. It’s a peril of all knowledge—it exposes you to the bewildering muchness of the universe ...
You lived for a time in Spain, and traveled in Africa ... did you ever consider a foreign-language course, so you could read work outside of English?
If you travel, of course, you at least get out the Berlitz phrase book, and I’ve tried to teach myself first French, then Italian. I took German lessons and Spanish lessons both. Out of all of this I can’t do very much—maybe I could have a conversation with a very indulgent Frenchman. I don’t feel I’ve reached the point I could really use any of these languages—but it’s like peeking into another person’s house; it’s an expansion of your sense of possibility, the way in which they are different, the way in which Italian grammar differs from ours. It makes you think of your own language—all the in-built rules you never think about.
In Picked Up Pieces, you had a piece on the future of the novel ... if you had to give a similar address on the future of the book review, what might it be?
I would think as the interest in books ebbs, so would the demand for book reviews. A number of newspapers have seen fit to eliminate the books page. Books like Grapes of Wrath and Main Street and Babbitt affected the general culture—even people who didn’t read them felt them. It’s hard to think of too many books which do that now.
I would say there is a general loss of intensity, too. The thorough put-down you used to see is fairly rare now. Christopher Hitchens and James Wood still do it every now and then. I am speaking as an elderly man, keep in mind, but there is a sense of fatigue in the book review as a genre ... the books keep coming, but why do they keep coming? My feeling of the book business is it’s on the decline, but there is an irreducible number of people who still find benefits and pleasures in reading that they can get nowhere else, and it is nonetheless an art very worth practicing. I am so happy I’ve had a life lived in books.
Speaking of which, what’s next?
I’ve always felt an obligation to my publisher to have a novel every other book, so the next book will be a novel—a sequel called The Widows of Eastwick. It seems to be sequels seasons—they seem to be in, even in the authorial business. The book stays in my mind, and I thought 25 years after writing it I could revisit the characters and find something new.