Last Thoughts On John Updike

I was touched by Julian Barnes’ essay about John Updike. So much of what Updike wrote resonates with me: I’m another of those who in Updike’s words, "....recognizes that I have never really left Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition." I was western Pa., he was eastern.

John Updike has been labeled many things, but prescient is not one I know of. I would like to add it as one of his gifts. I refer to "White on White" in his 1982 book "Bech is Back". In his fashion, Bech was observing the female contingent at another party he had reluctantly agreed to attend. As so often with Bech he managed to go further than stare, and gained the ear of one with whom he quickly arranged a tryst. Bech would have to wait until she finished her work there. The host had his female mud wrestlers attending with instructions to mingle. She was one of them. A second Amazon soon sauntered by, smiled in welcome and said to Bech,

“’Hey, man.’
‘Hey, he answered.’
‘What juice you groovin’ on?’
‘Noble dispassion,’ he answered.”

Bech realized through the white paint of her face makeup that she was black. Then Updike wrote, "America at heart is black, he (Bech) saw. Snuggling into the jazz that sings to our bones, we feel that the negro lives deprived and naked among us as the embodiment of truth, and that when the castle of credit cards collapses a black god will redeem us."

The "credit cards" and "black god" seem germane at the moment. Whether redemption will come is uncertain. Gods are in the mind's eye. Still, his sentence stands as a harbinger.