It’s not cool to like the writing of John Updike. But it’s the right thing to do.

Over at The New Republic, William Deresiewicz reminds us why:

Updike strikes me as the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered. The time will come — in thirty or fifty or a hundred years — when the values of our own effulgent age will seem as odious as those of the 1950s (or for that matter, of the 1850s) do to us today. No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote. They will turn to him — readers will, and writers, I think, especially will — for what is permanently valid in his work: the virtuosity of his technique, his ability to craft a sentence, a scene, a story, to calibrate tones and modulate effects; the penetration of his eye, his gift for seeing things and seeing into minds; his brave, honest, unembarrassed frankness; and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose.

Updike started out being hated by folks on one end of the spectrum — who believed, wrongly, that all he wrote about was sex — and ended up being hated by folks on the other end, who viewed him, equally mistakenly, as a misogynist. In our current culture, in which the Fifty Shades of Grey books sell millions of copies, and pornography is a multibillion-dollar business, the notion that Updike’s realistic depictions of sex in a humane context are something to worry about is merely quaint. But the anti-feminist rap against Updike deserves, in our current cultural plight, a little more attention. The locus classicus of this opinion was the famous phrase of David Foster Wallace, who quoted a female friend’s gibe that Updike was “a penis with a thesaurus.” Now, David Foster Wallace has basically been canonized as a secular saint, and to be dismissed by him in this fashion amounts to having the phrase Not. Cool. branded on your forehead. Deresiewicz tries to put Updike’s sexual attitudes in context:

Updike — and Mailer, and Roth, and the other men (and women) of their generation — were situated at a complicated juncture in the history of sexuality. They came of age before the revolution, but not so long before that they couldn’t try to join it. Sexual freedom descended on them not as a birthright, but as a miracle. Of course they went a little wild. When the Pill came out in 1960, the oldest member of the baby boom was fourteen. Updike was 28. If he spent a lot of time thinking about sex, it’s not a big surprise. Updike, like his contemporaries, was also too early for feminism. That may not be conducive to the most progressive attitudes . . . but it also means that Updike stood between the old and new Victorianisms.

I would add my two cents here: It’s possible to have a rather restrained, conservative sexual morality without lapsing into “old Victorianism”; and it’s eminently possible to be a 100 percent card-carrying non-misogynist pro-feminist without joining the “new Victorianism” of the shrill speech-and-thought police. But Deresiewicz is pointing to something important: Updike, as a man of his generation, did not view ideologizing about men and women to be his basic calling in life. It was sufficient for him to watch men and women, to notice, and to record his observations in some of the best prose ever produced by an American writer.

There’s a lot of insight in Deresiewicz’s piece. Even some parts I disagreed with I found thought-provoking. But I was especially delighted with Deresiewicz’s appreciation of how important Updike’s religious faith was in his writing, and how Updike managed to celebrate America without even a hint of jingoism.

I think the best summary of the appeal of Updike’s writing would apply to him the words he used to characterize the work of Vladimir Nabokov: He “writes prose the only way it should be written: ecstatically.” Of course, no writer can live up to that standard all the time. But I think Updike’s career batting average was very, very high.