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David Foster Wallace on John Updike: A Legacy of One

What a man leaves behind when he's spent a lifetime writing only about himself.

Editor’s note: Every fortune, eventually, produces an heir who wants no part of it. In 1997, a 35-year-old David Foster Wallace took a scalpel to John Updike and the postwar “Great Male Narcissists”—not over the prose, which he admired, but over a self-absorption so complete it left nothing behind worth inheriting. As Observer reflects on succession—money, values, the discipline required to make a legacy outlast its founder—Wallace’s review catalogs what Updike failed to pass down and warns about what happens when a man writes only of himself. This article was originally published on October 13, 1997. 

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John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?

Of the 25 Updike books I’ve read, ‘Toward the End of Time’ is far and away his worst; a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

Mailer, Updike, Roth: The Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the ’60s and ’70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV. As were Freud’s, Mr. Updike’s big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that the mood of his books has gotten more wintery in recent years is understandable—Updike has always written largely about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he’s been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans. Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do think that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent—I’ve continued to read Mr. Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.

Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason-mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”

“Has the son of a bitch ever had one........

© Observer