The Nerve Interview: John Updike

by Will Doig


June 21, 2006

"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."
    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 Nerve 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?
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.

One of the things that compels Ahmad to terrorism in this book is his hatred of America's permissive attitude toward sex. And yet from where I stand, America seems more sexually repressed than ever. How is there such a disconnect between what he sees and what I see?
I think through the eyes of a fervent Muslim, there's still a great deal of exposure, of female flesh, of open flirtation. Now you see a lot more public kissing than you used to when I was a boy. Ahmad would still see plenty to be shocked and offended by.

Do you agree that we're becoming more prudish, or does every new generation think that?
I think the sexual revolution is over. It began with the invention of the pill, which enabled women to fuck without fear of pregnancy, and the party was on. But the party ended with AIDS. AIDS has been a great chastener of the untrammeled sex instinct.

One of the overarching themes of this book seems to be a general skepticism about modernity. A lot of the characters seem hollowed out by modern life. Are you cynical about modernity?
I think it exacts a price. The good side is fast transportation and less back-breaking labor and superior medicine. On the other hand, there was a simplicity about the old village life. You were born and died in the same place, surrounded by more or less the same people. The sorrow of death was softened by ancestors and descendants. You saw yourself as a continuum, and modernity has made that old-fashioned. Now we are single vehicles, self-propelled, and as a result, we often feel lost or alone. We resort to chemical substances to restore us to something like happiness.

You once said that you're not comfortable with the internet or the idea of digitizing books.
I never thought that speech would haunt me the way it has. So be it. An electronic future in which all books, past and present, would be available for nothing, the return of the big library of Alexandria that was burned down by Christian fanatics early in the last millennium — I cannot help but notice that this scenario leaves out both the individual authors getting royalties and booksellers making a profit. I can only observe that this will be the end of authorship as we know it.

Another thing you once said is that you believe "fellatio is more intimate than intercourse because it involves one's head." What's interesting about oral sex is that many couples have a lot of it early on, but as their relationship ages, oral sex drops out of their sexual repertoire and they just have conventional intercourse. What does that say about intimacy in couples? Do people become more estranged the longer they stay together?
I think my most vivid and heartfelt descriptions of oral sex came in a book called Couples. It was daring at the time to even describe [oral sex]. But the head getting close to the genitals is, in a way, more intimate than letting the genitals do it on their own. Our sensory organs, including the brain, are right down there, and if it happens less frequently in couples as the relationship ages and evolves, it's because it's an act of worship, really. You are worshipping the other person's genitals. That may be a kind of ardor that cannot be sustained forever.

Aside from sexual passion, why do many couples become alienated from each other with time, when conventional wisdom says that the passage of time should bond them?
I think nature designed sex to make babies and it isn't as interested in the aftermath of baby creation. Men, especially, wander off and try to reconstruct the joy of new sexual acquaintance. Women, too, admit they're prone to wonder what it might be like with another man. Or another woman. It just seems to be part of the brain problem that we know this person — the biblical verb "know" — and that once known, you're interested in knowing something else.

Somebody said that one of the reasons most societies are so ferocious in protecting women is that once a woman sleeps with another man, she knows something that her husband does not. So it's fear of knowing too much, wanting to know too much, and maybe even knowing that the husband is a loser. For all these reasons, very few marital relations are totally stable and the partners are rarely totally satisfied. But law provides that it's difficult to get out of marriage, despite the quantity of use today. It's a legal contract and, once signed, cannot be broken lightly, so people stay together. And, to some extent, fall in love again.

So is it worth it to hang in there even when it feels more natural to separate?
My opinion is yes. I've been married twice, and breaking up the first marriage was the worst thing I've ever done, in terms of suffering. I wouldn't want to go through it again.  n°

©2006 Will Doig and Nerve.com