Remembering Updike: ZZ Packer

I read John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” while in Japan, and quickly worked my way backwards to the rest of the “Rabbit” quartet, and eventually through all of Updike’s stories.  There seemed to me not many American novelists who were working so steadfastly in such riveting contradictions; both the patrician and the suburban, both sexual dynamism and sexual dysfunction, the commercial and the divine.  There seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic. 

He had, when it came to matters of race, a sort of frank voyeurism, in that he dealt with it, put it on the table, served it up, then waited to see what others would make of it.  Whereas “Rabbit Redux” might seem to ask whether we’re a melting pot or cesspool, the answer ultimately says more about the person answering than it does about Updike the interlocutor—a neat trick of his. 

I came to first meet Updike when he recommended my book for a televised book club.  It was very like him to champion a young writer in print (he has set some people aghast by comparing young writers to Proust and Nabokov) and very unlike him to appear on television.  Nevertheless, I found myself in the “Today Show” greenroom when Updike appeared, taller than I’d even imagined, his face and brows smeared with peach make-up.  I introduced myself. “ I’m ZZ,” I said, and he said, without missing a beat, “I’m Orange.” 

We were soon met by an incredibly effusive Katie Couric who shook both our hands, congratulated me, then asked Updike, “How does it feel to be the coolest writer in America!”  Updike looked at me as if to say he’d been called many things, but “cool” was not one of them.  We sat down for a televised interview in which Updike was gracious and erudite, while I broke my frozen smile every once in a while to murmur a few incoherent syllables of either gratitude or awe. 

When the interview was over, Couric pumped our hands once more, patted Updike on the shoulder as though his sow had just won the state fair, and disappeared. “ Now that was strange,” Updike said, including me in on whatever joke had been playing out.  By the time Updike and I parted ways after another session in the greenroom, I had to admit that on that day I agreed with Katie Couric: John Updike was the Coolest Writer in America. 

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