Good morning Boys and Girls.

Now John Updike.

Damn. My heroes are falling off the planet's surface faster than I can replace them, and I resent it.

Updike might just have been the quintessential American novelist during past half-century. Witty, erudite, urbane - the man was to "the great American novel" as Coca Cola is to "the great American soft-drink."

My first exposure to Updike was "Rabbit, Run", the first of his "Rabbit" books. If I remember correctly, I "borrowed" it from my Dad's Dad when I was in high school - probably without his permission; certainly without my parent's; it was racy stuff. Rabbit - Harry Angstrom, a sort of anti-hero, was a former high-school athlete of renown who faces his life; a life he feels trapped in; with a combined sense of hope and doom, as his former greatness slowly fades - first into fond memories, then, as time passes, into something worse than irrelevance.

Harry wasn't a likable guy on all counts, but personally, I grew to love him during the thirty-plus years it took Mr. Updike to chronicle his oh-so-American life and loves - and even his death and its aftermath - in the four-and-a-half books he wrote about Rabbit and the rest of the Angstroms.

Not universally loved, over the years Updike has been called plenty of names. Norman Mailer called him a lightweight. Others have called him a racist and misogynistic, but having read so much of his work over the years, I'm convinced that Updike himself didn't harbor such qualities and/or attitudes. On the other hand, he certainly gave these attributes - and worse - to some of his more memorable characters. Some folks thought he was obsessed with sex, and perhaps that's fair - maybe he was. He certainly wrote about it a lot. To me, though, he seemed to capture the way people of his generation - my parents' generation - dealt with the subject. His women characters weren't super-models, nor were his men Adonises. He wrote about people that felt real; or they did to me. Mailer was right in some respects. Updike was a lightweight, in that didn't choose big topics to write about, but instead primarily wrote about fairly normal people dealing with life as they lived it, yet he did it with such care and beauty, that even the smallest things - seemingly minor events - took on the same importance for his characters that small things take on for the rest of us. -A trivial slight in a social setting years ago - or a kindness - is remembered a decade later; and, without the rememberer seeming the least bit petty. -That's reality, isn't it?

A master of description; he was a poet who most often used prose as his chosen meter. I always felt like he loved every single one of his characters, so careful was he in his introductions to us of them. We grew to know and understand his characters so very well, in fact, that toward the end of his stories, we readers knew how they'd react to upcoming situations; how they'd be affected. He'd set up our expectations and then fulfill them perfectly. However, having said all this; there was nothing akin to a soap opera-like quality in anything of his I ever read - it felt far too real to be trivialized like that. Maybe the difference was that very aspect I talked about earlier; that past events weighed so heavily on his characters the way they can and often do with all of us.

There was a movie made of "Rabbit, Run" thirty years ago starring Bruce Dern, Jack Albertson and Carrie Snodgrass. I saw it, but I didn't like it. The most famous movie made from any of Updike's novels was "the Witches of Eastwick", which was pretty good, but wasn't all that reflective of the novel - which itself was quite a departure for him. Perhaps the reason more movies haven't been made from his novels is that, frankly, his plots aren't all that exciting - never have been. -That's okay with me. I think he did that by choice, not because of any lack of imagination

I saw online yesterday that Updike has written fifty books, meaning there are at least ten or fifteen out there I haven't gotten to yet - including a new novel from just this past year, "the Widow's of Eastwick". I'll guess it's about the same women we met in his first Eastwick novel.

I'm glad of that.


Be good to everyone.