{"id":3699,"date":"2017-02-05T09:27:34","date_gmt":"2017-02-05T15:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3699"},"modified":"2017-02-05T09:32:07","modified_gmt":"2017-02-05T15:32:07","slug":"ian-mcewan-talks-about-the-updike-influence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2017\/02\/05\/ian-mcewan-talks-about-the-updike-influence\/","title":{"rendered":"Ian McEwan talks about the Updike influence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In a Culture segment for Five Books<\/em>, novelist Ian McEwan<\/strong> “talks about the books that have helped shape his own\u2014from the biography of a scientific genius to a treatise on the end of time\u2014and the importance of finding ‘mental freedom.'”<\/p>\n

Here are the exchanges having to do with the Updike influence:<\/p>\n

Would you go to Updike for sex, if not Larkin?<\/strong>
\nI think some of the descriptions of sex in Updike are extraordinary. I could never follow him down his route because his gift is one I\u2019ve never hoped to emulate, which is the visual. In a sense he almost debunks or destroys the thing he\u2019s describing, because of his clinical eye, but it does take my breath away. In this realm he\u2019s a master of the hyper-real.<\/p>\n

Talk a little about John Updike if you will, who died not long ago, in 2009. Your third book is Rabbit at Rest, the fourth of his \u2018Rabbit\u2019 novels.<\/strong>
\nUpdike has been a very important writer for me, the one I\u2019ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often. I was deeply touched by his death. I felt that we had conversations unfulfilled \u2013 we got to know each other a little in the last six or seven years of his life, and we had a correspondence.<\/p>\n

What was he like, his character?<\/strong>
\nHe was impenetrably courteous. At first, quite difficult to get beyond his very gentlemanly, polite and considerate shell. He protected himself. Behind this shell was all of his work. It was easier to get a more intimate Updike by writing letters. If I wrote, I\u2019d get a response by return of post, apologising for being so quick, just as I would be apologising for my delayed replies. He said it was the only way he could keep his desk clear. But of course it was not that at all. This was a highly organised mind with boundless creative energy. He could turn in 1200 words of fiction in a day, write a review or an essay, and still address his correspondence.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve called him \u2018the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death\u2019. What is it about Updike that deserves that praise?<\/strong>
\nGreat sentence-maker; extraordinary noticer; wonderful eye for detail; great fondler of details, to use Nabokov\u2019s phrase. Huge comic gift, finding its supreme expression in the Bech trilogy. A great chronicler, in the Rabbit tetralogy, of American social change in the 40 years spanned by those books. Ruthless about women, ruthless about men. (Feminists are wrong to complain. There\u2019s a hilarious streak of misanthropy in Updike). He reminds us that all good writing, good observation contains a seed of comedy. A wonderful maker of similes. His gift was to render for us the fine print, the minute detail of consciousness, of what it\u2019s like in a certain moment to be another person, to inhabit another mind. In that respect, Angstrom will be his monument.<\/p>\n

You say feminists are wrong to criticise him, but there is that criticism \u2013 that he has a \u2018male gaze\u2019. Do you face the same challenges when you write female characters?<\/strong>
\nI have done occasionally. It means nothing to me. This is a visual form. Remember Conrad\u2019s exhortations in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: \u2018I am trying\u2026by the power of the written word\u2026to make you see.\u2019<\/p>\n

Harry \u2018Rabbit\u2019 Angstrom was, I gather, an inspiration for Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar?<\/strong>
\nI crouched in Updike\u2019s shadow. I set myself the problem of having an unsympathetic hero, and enticing a reader to stay in his company for the length of a novel. With Rabbit, Updike showed us how this is achieved. Rabbit is not the nicest of men, his is a narrow consciousness, he\u2019s of limited education, deeply ungenerous in the private life \u2013 remember how he makes love to his son\u2019s wife? Grumpy, irritable, bigoted in some respects, and yet somehow Updike succeeds in making him the prism through which 40 years of American social change is observed, and 40 years of close shifts within family relations, adulterous affairs and the tragedy of a lost child.
\nHow does he do this? Well, he invents an altered or heightened realism. He gives Rabbit his own \u2013 Updike\u2019s \u2013 thoughts, and yet somehow he makes them plausibly Rabbit\u2019s. Rabbit has reflections on mortality that could only be, in any realistic frame, Updike\u2019s. But he makes them Rabbit\u2019s; he shoehorns them into this limited mental space. It\u2019s a rhetorical trick. In short, what Updike succeeds in doing is to make Rabbit interesting. He might not be good, but he\u2019s interesting, and we travel with him for that reason alone. I can\u2019t claim for a moment to have come anywhere near this with Michael Beard, but that was the example at my side.<\/p>\n

When I feel my faith flagging in the whole enterprise of fiction \u2013 and all writers experience this \u2013 a few pages of Updike will restore my energies and optimism.<\/p>\n

“Ian McEwan recommends Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a Culture segment for Five Books, novelist Ian McEwan “talks about the books that have helped shape his own\u2014from the biography of a scientific genius to a treatise on the end of time\u2014and the importance of finding ‘mental freedom.’” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-updike-in-context"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3702,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699\/revisions\/3702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}