6 - Keeping Up the Pace (1991–1995)

Summary

After the success of Rabbit at Rest, few would have held it against Updike if he would have eased up on the grinding publication schedule he had set for himself more than three decades earlier. Yet in 1991 his name graced the spine of another hefty collection of nonfiction, Odd Jobs, and a year later he published a new novel, Memories of the Ford Administration. If there was a break, it came in 1993 when he collected the poetry he had been publishing since the 1950s into a surprisingly large volume. He brought out another novel in 1994, Brazil, and followed up later in the same year with a new collection of short fiction, The Afterlife and Other Stories. However, none of these works received the kind of superlative reviews that greeted Rabbit at Rest. In fact, both new novels were routinely dismissed as inferior to Updike's best work. Some reviewers suggested that Updike's creative powers were fading.

Ironically, however, when Nicolette Jones (1994) asked a group of writers and critics to identify the greatest living novelist writing in English, Updike ranked second, behind Saul Bellow. Jones quotes a number of the responses she received in her London Times article; these give some indication of what Updike's contemporaries thought of him. Anita Brookner praises Updike for his “easy and lucid command of the language.”