We just discovered a blog entry by music journalist, musician, and street photographer Ted Burke: “John Updike’s Underpraised Genius” (posted May 10, 2024), in which Burke argued that “what the departed Updike leaves behind is one of the most impressive bodies of work a contemporary writer, American or otherwise, would want for a legacy.
“His Rabbit quartet of novels . . . is among the peerless accomplishments of 20th century fiction in its chronicle of living through the confusion of the Viet Nam war, feminism, civil rights and the sexual revolution in the person of the series’ titular character, Rabbit Angstrom. Not deep of thought but rich in resentment, Angstrom was an analog of American culture itself, a congested vein of self-seeking that never recovered from the raw sensation of youthful vigor; Angstrom, like the country itself, resentfully fumbled about for years ruing the loss of vitality and trying to replace it with new things, the crabby possessiveness of the middle class.”
Burke concluded, “If a writer’s task is, among others, to help us understand the actions that cause us to fall down and act badly despite our best intentions, Updike has performed a patriotic service. There should be some prize for that.”
Actually, there was. For his contributions to American culture, in two separate White House ceremonies Updike received the National Medal of Arts from Pres. George H.W. Bush in 1989 and the National Humanities Medal from Pres. George W. Bush in 2003.