John Updike died

Unlike his older contemporary Salinger, John Updike declared that he would prefer “to be a bad writer than not to write at all.” And since the 50s, he published more than 50 novels, collections of poems, stories, and essays. His columns on literature were published until recently in The New Yorker magazine. Updike, who spent most of his life as a writer, explained it by the need to keep in touch with the outside world - at least through literary correspondence. And yet, Updike called Proust, the same Salinger and Nabokov K. as his models. He even wrote a preface to the republication of the latter’s lectures.

In the late 60s, Updike attended literary readings in the Soviet Union - he stood on the same stage with Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - and then recalled that the audience greeted him with thunderous applause, not so much as a writer, but as a representative of another country. The melancholy and confusion of residents of American suburbs, passed off in the USSR as signs of the moral decay of the capitalist country, were in fact a kind of search for faith, a higher meaning, delicately not called by name. In his own words, John Updike dealt with existential micro-crises; the state of America "in the present tense", reflected in private life.

Influenced by the disaster of September 11, Updike writes the novel "The Terrorist", the hero of which is Ahmad, a young loser suicide bomber, half-Irish, half-Egyptian, desperately in conflict with American reality. The same thoughts, the same heavy condensed climate of a small town that in the 60s led to the escape from reality of Rabbit Angstrom, the hero of Updike’s early and most famous novel “Run, Rabbit, Run,” at the beginning of the 21st century lead Ahmad to decisive, albeit destructive actions.

In an interview about modern America, John Updike used the expression “moral erosion.” He is one of the last representatives of a generation of writers who had a taste for pompous expressions, from which the general public was ready to listen to such words without an ironic grin.

On January 27, 2009, John Updike died in a Massachusetts hospice.

Sofia SAPOZHNIKOVA