8 - New Experiments in the New Century (2000–2004)

Summary

The continuing debate over Updike's status at the beginning of the twenty-first century can be illustrated by the following three assessments. In his lengthy History of American Literature (2004), Richard Gray describes Updike as a master craftsman whose novels deal with problems posed by the “entropic vision” that characterizes modern life (615). But Jay Prosser (2001b) insists that, whatever Updike's supporters say about his talents, the decline in his reputation, though not “spectacular,” has been “significant.” Prosser believes this falling off is inevitable, because in his view Updike was never “America's most representative contemporary author”; instead, if he “was ever America's literary consciousness, it was a white consciousness” (579). By contrast, William Pritchard argues in Updike: America's Man of Letters (2000) that Updike is a unique figure in American literature: a man of letters in the tradition of Hawthorne, Howells, and Edmund Wilson, dedicated to the task of interpreting the world by examining his own life and extrapolating from it to explore American society and the American psyche during the latter half of the twentieth century. The debate over the value of Updike's work would not be solved during the next five years, either, as Updike published three new novels, a short story collection, and a volume of poems that would add bulk to his canon if they did not materially strengthen his claim as the country's pre-eminent writer.