RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
Author John Updike, the relentless chronicler of postwar America, has died. In his vast body of work, Updike probed the ordinary dramas that unfold in suburban and small-town America. He described his creative process in a 1984 interview with Book Beat Radio's Don Swaim.
(SOUNDBITE OF 1984 INTERVIEW)
JOHN UPDIKE: The moment of excitement really comes before you actually sit down at all at the desk. It's when you get the idea and you feel it inside you as something wanting to be born, wanting to be said. And then you see the book more or less whole. Then you are inspired, if ever, and feel excited about it. And the rest is work of a kind.
MONTAGNE: And in John Updike's case, the rest was a lot. In addition to his many novels, he wrote more than 800 stories, essays, poems and book reviews for the New Yorker magazine. Joining us now is David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. Good morning.
DAVID REMNICK: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: John Updike once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules." Lovely sentiment. How did that play out in his work?
REMNICK: Well, in many ways. But I think one of the things that he was, was determinedly the chronicler of the middle of American life. He was not a writer about kings and queens, nor was he someone who, like Claude Brown or writers we have who've experienced the worst of urban life, that chronicler. He was someone whose great hero in the Rabbit novels was someone who sold used Toyotas.
MONTAGNE: And that was Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.
REMNICK: That's right. Which is not, if you think about it, what you'd expect the hero of "Remembrance of Things Past" or "War and Peace" to be. But he was very much of the middle, as you...
MONTAGNE: This car salesman, at the center - you know, but also a high school sports hero - what did he get from him that spoke to that world, that suburban, small-town world?
REMNICK: Well, Julian Barnes is a wonderful novelist himself and an admirer of John's. Described coming to America for a book tour, you know, lots of time on his hands, lots of time on planes and trains. And in London, he bought the first Rabbit novel, and as he criss-crossed the country, he read all of them. And he realized that he just saw so much of American life, whether it's just the small sadnesses of, as you say, the high school athlete who suddenly realizes that his glories are all behind him, or the transactions between husband and wife and wife and husband, and parent and child. Infidelities...
MONTAGNE: And betrayals, yeah.
REMNICK: Everything, everything of American life is in that quartet of novels. And I should say, as an editor of the New Yorker, and somebody who grew up as a kid reading him, a really young kid reading him, at first, to be the manager of this - to be privileged to be the manager of this thing is suddenly like having Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio leave - although he was a great Red Sox fan.
MONTAGNE: although for you too, you knew him. What does it mean - what is your thought, just in the few seconds we have?
REMNICK: I'm bereft. The entire magazine is - feels that way. He meant everything to us. You know, the historical accounts of the magazine have Thurber and E.B. White as these big, large, mythological figures at the beginning of the magazine. He meant everything to the magazine, not for three or four or five years, but for half a century, and with an intensity and a level that's just impossible to imagine, and certainly impossible to replace.
MONTAGNE: David, thanks very much.
REMNICK: Sure.
MONTAGNE: David Remnick is editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, remembering author John Updike, who died yesterday at the age of 76. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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