Like Writing Fresh-Painted Sentences

I think it was Jordan who wrote to me a couple of weeks back and asked me if I'd read anything on John Updike passing away. I wrote back something to the effect of, No, never been much interested in him, plus there was the David Foster Wallace piece on Updike et al. that sank whatever interest I might have had in the man.

Snide response aside, I might be coming around, or at least learning something from Updike by way of the New Yorker. My mom passes her old copies down like so many second-hand shirts, and I thumb through them at spare moments during the day. Last night I happened to skim through Adam Gopnik's and Roger Angell's obituaries for Updike (Gopnik and Angell) and was struck. By what, precisely, I can't say, because on returning to the interwebs today, I couldn't pin down what exactly it was that touched a chord.

Gopnik writes of Updike:

Comedy was his default mode, though, and comedy is made of realism alloyed with love. A note of happiness rings through Updike’s prose, and draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness unaware of death (a preoccupation with death and dying was a steady feature of his work), but neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his life liking things. Women’s clothes, their hair, the hybridization of American accents; the way that the hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all these images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with love. It is his affections that rise, and that we recall.

Angell adds this:

Updike’s sentences are fresh-painted. In all his writing, critical or fictional or reportorial, he is a fabulous noticer and expander; he’s invented HD. So armed, he felt free from the start to take up and engage with all that lay within the range of his attention and put it down on paper. He had never to my knowledge written about sports when, on a morning in late September, 1960, he was stood up by a woman in Boston with whom he had an assignation and instead went to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox, in the final home game of Ted Williams’s career.

To write fresh-painted sentences. I think that might have been it that stuck out to me last night, but something also in Updike's affections for the world, for its joys and beauties. And while my life has not lacked for affections recently, I feel that my writing has lost a kind of vivid quality (if it had it to begin), a sense of being new on the tongue, in the mouth, at the fingers.

Not a new ethic by any means, but a helpful reminder about writing: The easy joy it can bring, easy not in the sense of coming without effort but in a different sense that the OED suggests: "Free from embarrassment or awkwardness". We'll see.