The legendary John Updike died today at age seventy-six. Former Hooksexup editor Will Doig interviewed him in 2006. When we asked Will about the experience this afternoon, he remembered, "I was nervous, knowing that I had a question about blowjobs three-quarters of the way down my list. When I finally asked it, he gave a fantastic answer in which he used the phrase 'worshipping the other person’s genitals.' Everything that came after that was just gravy." — Ed.
"If the power to shock may be taken as a yardstick of fiction, John Updike, 28, has written one of the year's most important novels." That was Time magazine's backhanded compliment for Rabbit, Run in 1960. Updike has garnered qualified praise throughout his career from critics who've had to reconcile their discomfort with his material with their admiration of his abilities. Rabbit, Run's assertion that even the most ideal marriages weren't providing all the sexual satisfaction men needed left American society, fresh from the ascetic 1950s, feeling dirty.
But the novel clearly spoke to people. It sold 26,000 copies within the decade (high for an unknown novelist back then), and laid the groundwork for Couples, the book in which Updike dissected marriage and sex with even more disturbing precision. Its adultery, wife-swapping and explicit sex scenes got the Man of Letters labeled a pornographer. Published in 1969, it sold 200,000 copies in two years. "I can think of no other novel," wrote The Atlantic Monthly, "even in these years of our sexual freedom, as sexually explicit in its language . . . as direct in its sexual reporting, as abundant in its sexual activities."
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Updike's latest novel, Terrorist, continues his habit of writing from a controversial perspective — in this case, an angry young Muslim named Ahmad whose imam in New Jersey has commissioned him to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel. The ire that Terrorist has drawn is similar to some of the complaints about his previous books, except that today, everyone — not just professional critics — has a platform on the internet. "Updike's latest is nothing more than a self-hating American on his knees," commented one reader on Amazon.com. "You sense that Updike hates the modern world, despite having contributed to its supposed malaise with his own envelope-pushing sexual novels . . . "
Now seventy-four, Updike spoke to Hooksexup about this perceived discomfort with modernity, and offered his views on marriage, AIDS and genital worship. — Will Doig
After spending so much time in bucolic New England and Pennsylvania, what brought you to gritty Northern New Jersey?
Well, I came from a gritty city on the outskirts of Reading. And though I haven't gone out of my way to live in gritty cities, I've always had a soft spot for them. The suspected terrorists all tended to be in gritty cities. And my vision of my young hero was that he would live in a run-down rust-belt kind of town. The Rabbit series, at least in its opening two novels, was also a gritty-city kind of saga.
Ever since you started that series almost fifty years ago, you've been trying to reconcile the human desire for lifelong companionship with the need for sexual freedom. What have you learned?
What Freud had proclaimed was that happiness relates to sex. If your sex is good, you are good. If it's not, you're not. That kind of sexual fulfillment was very hard to attain.
The human brain is naturally curious, and it's fairly hard for people equipped with such a brain to settle into a monogamous relationship. A monogamous relationship is what society prefers. It's easier to organize. Yet in my lifetime, I've witnessed the breakdown of many marriages, both before and after the so-called revolution in the '60s, when everybody — not just young people, but also middle-aged suburbanites — felt entitled to widen their sexual palate. The rich have always felt entitled to that, but it came down into the middle class with a thump! in the mid '60s.
What Freud had proclaimed was that happiness relates to sex. If your sex is good, you are good. If it's not, you're not. That kind of sexual fulfillment was very hard to attain. And even once you attain it, it tends to leak away, so there's a constant fever of human unhappiness that characterizes our condition.
In Terrorist, it struck me that Ahmad's guidance counselor, Jack, was staying in his marriage out of an abstract sense of duty, and that this resembled Ahmad's abstract sense of duty to remain faithful to Islam, even when doing so went against his instincts. Were you trying to make that link?
In a way. Ahmad gets a sense of security, purpose and direction [from Islam]. Jack is loyal to Beth more out of inertia, because they have a past and a comfortable present.
It's amazing how many marriages are sustained by a need for comfort and convenience.
Well one of the things that's happened is, it used to be that in order to get sex, you more or less had to marry. That's no longer true. My own children, for example, married later than I did and with a more mature sense of what the marriage contract was all about. Modern young people seem to be, by and large, very committed to being good parents.
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