Ben Lerner is to Jonathan Franzen as Richard Ford is to John Updike.
Lerner and Franzen write in the voices of painfully self-aware Midwesterners. I suspect they actually are painfully self-aware Midwesterners, but that could just be their personas. Ford and Updike write in the voiced of confident but slightly goofy middle-aged Wasps. Updike himself is a bit of a rebooted John O’Hara; we’ve discussed this on the blog before.
What’s cool about Lerner and Ford is that they’re working within existing styles but they have better production values, as it were; they can convey the story more smoothly.
Seeing this sort of incremental improvement also gives a sense of why writers sometimes want to create new forms, so as not to get trapped in technique.
These observations are not new; they just came to mind recently and I wanted to share them with you.
Interesting that you compare Updike with O’Hara. O’Hara fell out of favor decades ago and Updike more recently. Ford continues to resonate with me and is worth re-reading. I find both Lerner and Franzen derivative and neither can carry William Gaddis’s water.
Alan:
A complicating factor here is that books are not a mass entertainment medium in the way that they were decades ago. There’s too much competition from on-demand TV, movies, video games, etc. With rare exceptions, even bestselling books today don’t sell a lot.
Has Updike fallen out of favor? I dunno. I think Rabbit, Run is still recognized as a classic. But, sure, not that many people read it anymore. For various reasons it’s not on the standard curriculum. There’s not much that people will be reading from 60 years ago if it’s not in school reading lists. Why did Gaddis get the works? Nobody’s business but the Turks.
Andrew:
Your point on reading as mass entertainment strikes me as correct. On of my favorite books, and I think it is ‘almost’ a perfect novel, is Shirley Hazzard’s “Transit of Venus.” We did this as a family book reading in 2021 when we were still gathering by Zoom. My wife hated it and could not finish it but the two daughters were spellbound. It was my fourth reading and I found things that I hadn’t seen before.
We had most of the Updike books but donated them when we downsized earlier this year. We kept Jennifer Egan, Gaddis, some Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy (which seems fitting for the current times) along with Library of America volumes of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald (my guilty pleasures).
Ford is better than Updike–what? Ford is excellent but Updike was a transcendent writer. I think–everyone thinks–his libido got away with him too often, but there are so many breathtaking passages in so many books (e.g., The Centaur, Of the Farm, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and even Terrorist) that it’s astonishing. No knock on Ford–I have The Sportswriter on my desk right now, marked for re-reading–but to my mind he’s not in the same class. Very few writers are. Updike’s main weakness is plot; his raw material is usually the quotidian, every day stuff, and compared to Roth (to cite another famous contemporary) he doesn’t seem as adapt at moving the pace along. But Roth might have 5-10 sentences in a novel that I stop to re-read, whereas Updike has that many in each chapter. To bring this response home, I’ll note that Updike was not on the reading lists in the 90s, when I was in college, but once I started reading him I realized (like Martin Amis) that I’d have to read just about everything he wrote because it’s just that good.
Dan:
My favorite book by Updike is Rabbit Run and my favorite book by Ford is The Sportswriter. Overall, yes, I’d say that Rabbit Run is better than The Sportswriter—to me, Rabbit Run is one of the great books of the century—but I think The Sportswriter is more controlled, more professional, than Rabbit Run. I just think that Ford has more command of the technical aspects of writing. But I’d have to look at these books more carefully to understand exactly what I mean here. I will say that I found some of Updike’s later novels to be unreadable. I’ve found some of Ford’s books to be boring, but never as clunky as the worst of Updike.
Speaking of books and sportswriting, I read Eight Men Out and it was really enjoyable. There’s lots of compelling characters in it.
Hi Andrew. Thanks for the reply! You’re busy and I was not expecting one–appreciate it. One more thought on this . . . I agree that some Updike novels are clunkers–I could not get through Roger’s Version–but you might look at some of his short stories, his poetry, or (apropos of this blog) his criticism of literature and/or art. I think the consensus view is that Updike was best at short stories because his command of the language and of technique at the level of the sentence, and possibly the paragraph, was unsurpassed. He’s weaker on plot and he wrote a book a year for ~50 years, and so some of them are rough, fully agreed. Finally, your reply also made me think of how I feel about two musicians. I’m from NJ and I will go to my grave singing Bruce Springsteen’s praises, but there are some songs of his (“Mary, Queen of Arkansas” comes to mind) that are just painful. A close friend and I agreed that Tom Petty is not in Bruce’s class, but on the other hand we couldn’t think of a Petty song that made us wince. I’ll take John Updike and the Boss every time for the highs, but perhaps with Richard Ford and Tom Petty I’d be spared some of the lower lows.