Updike (82 page)

*
In fact, Updike very likely had in mind a Reading dealership on Lancaster Avenue, which in the seventies was lined with car showrooms.

*
MTV was launched just a few months before the novel was published.

*
In “Rabbit Remembered,” Nelson gives his diagnosis: His father was “narcissistically impaired. . . . Intuitive but not very empathic. He never grew up.”

*
He also thought of the Shillington house, where as a child he “soaked up love and strength,” as a “big white house,” though it was big only in comparison with the cramped Plowville farmhouse and the modesty of his family’s means.

*
The Buchanans’ house was actually a red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, presumably built of brick. Haven Hill was all white and clapboard.

*
Updike once observed, writing about Harry Angstrom, that Rabbit’s life was less “defended” than his own.

*
This kind of complicity crops up regularly in the stories from this period. In “The Journey to the Dead,” the recently divorced protagonist is involved with a woman who’s “possessive of his time,” who “kept watch on it.” He reflects, “His life seemed destined never to be wholly his own. By his choice, of course.”

*
He wrote, “I once moved to a venerable secluded town, not far from Salem, where there had been a scandal”—an allusion to rumors of witchcraft that haunted Ipswich long before the Updikes arrived in town. Also, in March 1960 a double suicide by cyanide poisoning marked the grisly end of an “unorthodox” Ipswich romantic triangle; this was the germ of the novel’s equally grisly murder-suicide: Sukie’s lover batters his wife to death, then hangs himself.

*
Anoff was the first of seven grandchildren. Liz, Michael, and Miranda had two children each; David, one.

*
Bleaker, in fact, than
Roger’s Version
, which is prickly rather than gloomy, and much funnier than Frederick Crews would have you believe.

*
He’s referring here to World War II, not the Vietnam War, but the acrobatics are impressive all the same.

*
In 1984, when it was first offered to him, Updike turned down the Saint Louis Literary Award, pleading a crowded schedule. In the interim it had been accepted by Walker Percy (1985) and Saul Bellow (1986); the luster of those names apparently made up for the modest prize money, a mere $1,500.

*
There were of course fictional elements, but almost all of them had to do with her son: Joey is given three ex-wives, a lucrative career in advertising, and a more urban pre-farmhouse boyhood than Updike himself had enjoyed.

*
The grandchildren and stepgrandchildren did mix between the covers of Updike’s books:
Bech at Bay
(1998) is dedicated to three of Martha’s and two of his, “the youngest people I know”; and the posthumous
My Father’s Tears
(2009), to all fourteen of them, his and hers listed on separate lines.
Trust Me
(1978) is dedicated to his three stepsons, “trusting and trustworthy.”

*
More than a decade later, Updike made use of the missing paintings in a valedictory poem to William Maxwell, who died in 2000, age ninety-one. The last lines of the poem read, “When wise / and kindly men die, who will restore / disappeared excellence to its throne.”

*
Updike never wore a wedding ring when he was married to Mary. She didn’t expect him to—her father didn’t wear one, and neither did Wesley Updike.

*
There was a melancholy aspect to his tidiness. A few years later, when he was assembling
Bech at Bay
(1998), he wrote to Oates, “I have a little Bech book in the works—I seem to be wrapping up, one character and theme after another.”

*
In “Bech Swings?” Bech despises the creature publicity has turned him into: “For his punishment, they had made from the sticks and mud of his words a coarse large doll to question and torment, which would not have mattered except that he was trapped inside the doll, shared a name and bank account with it.”

*
The account of her relentless campaign against marauding deer was no caricature.

*
“Woods [
sic
] is a great annoyance,” Updike wrote, “in part because he is so intelligent, in a needling, fussy kind of way.” In 2007, Wood joined
The New Yorker
as a staff writer and book critic—a bitter pill for Updike to swallow.

*
Although he warned his editor that the review was “a very hasty job and would admit of much improvement,” the lethal finished product shows no sign of haste.

*
He also indulged in a classic Mailerism: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over.”

*
Harold Bloom, who’d proclaimed Updike “a minor novelist with a major style,” was inducted on the same day—another good reason to steer clear of West 155th Street.

*
The book was Blake Bailey’s
Cheever
, and the review, Updike’s last, appeared in
The New Yorker
posthumously, on March 9, 2009.

*
The dedication of
Endpoint
reads, “For Martha, who asked for one more book: here it is, with all my love.”