"A thrilling collection of voices."
Category: I need to take a moment to note the passing of one of America’s greatest writers: John Updike. When I first started to read his novels, I could not understand his concerns. Why was he writing about these well-off middle class people? His characters had affairs and the affairs were known and these known transgressions seemed too light. What was at stake? Would the children go without food? Would the husband lose his job? I was from a different class and a different world. I respected his writing. His style and insight and description were amazing. I knew I was reading the work of a brilliant man. But in the end, so what?
I made a decision to respect this genius writer, but I didn’t like his work. He writes about the east. I am from the west. He writes about the upper middle class. I am from the edge of the middle class: the bottom is right there where I can touch it with my toes.
Then something changed. I was traveling north into Oregon with a family of migrant workers, picking fruit, writing, taking photographs, and living in my 1972 Nova. I stopped to get gas. There was a table with used books for sale and I bought the paperback “Too Far To Go” that had just come out. There they were, the same people, but something was different: spare prose, clean description, emotional depth in perfect dialogue. It was as if John Updike had stepped out of the frame and told his story plainly. I could feel his heart in that book. I was in my twenties, living in a car, and he made me care about these characters. What was once respect became awe. I came to understand that he wrote books about people in the world he lived in because he loved them. He had to write those books. Read “Too Far To Go.” It’s there.
Tricia Vance asked me, when I was young, why was I spending time in the morning writing? What was I doing? At that moment, I was sitting on an overturned bucket watching a ragged group of friends, an ex-lover, and a woman I was in love with, playing softball in the parking lot of a run-down apartment building. I told Tricia, because of this, because someone has to catch this.
She smiled like she felt sorry for me, and then dragged me into the game. A year later, she was dead.
The great Mr. Updike taught me that if we write what we know about who we know because we love them, we will write something that can touch anyone — even a broke kid reading by flashlight trying to fall asleep in the back of a Chevy.
