John Updike is the ultimate old-school writer. "I'm a dinosaur," he says. He has no cell phone, no iPod, and no Internet access from his computer, partly because he worries that hackers could destroy a year's worth of his writing. Plus, "I prefer looking things up in books," he says. "If I need to Google, I go to the library." Yet in no way does his technophobia hamper his productivity--in fact, it might even enhance it. For more than half a century, he's been blackening pages mostly by pencil, and the result has been torrential.
Updike's latest novel, a sequel to 1984's The Witches of Eastwick called The Widows of Eastwick, is number 23, and he has more than a dozen short-story collections, a raft of poems and book reviews, and several volumes of art criticism to his credit. He's also won the most significant literary awards of the day, including two Pulitzers.
The author, 76, is tall, lean, and thatchy-haired, but his blue-blooded looks and Harvard-honed bearing are deceptive. Most of his childhood was spent in Shillington, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble farm-and-factory community where his father taught school and his mother sold drapes. She aspired to the writer's life but never made it; both of his parents encouraged their only child to tap his creativity.
Yet for all his love of the elegant and high-minded, Updike's favorite fictional characters remain as familiar as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star bewildered by middle age. And Updike can be fetchingly entertaining, as he proved with The Witches of Eastwick, which became a successful film (starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Jack Nicholson); it's also been a stage musical and may become a television series. The Widows of Eastwick picks up with those same winsome characters, several decades older now but at no loss for fresh challenges.
Updike lives in a spacious home overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Boston's North Shore. He's surprisingly modest, a legend grateful for his good fortune.
Q: What led you to write the sequel to The Witches of Eastwick?
A: Sequels have been kind to me. I wrote a sequel to Rabbit, Run [published in 1960], and that worked out so well, I wrote three more. Witches was made into a movie; it had a track record. At my age, you're not brimming with ideas. One way to deal with being elderly as a writer is to make your characters elderly, so I aged the witches and had them return to the place of their prime. It was fun to write.
Q: One of your witches describes today's Eastwick as a town of "toned-up young mothers driving their overweight boys in overweight SUVs to hockey practice 20 miles away, the young fathers castrated namby-pambies helping itty-bitty wifey with the housekeeping, spending all Saturday fussing around the lovely home. It's the Fifties all over again, without the Russians as an excuse." Is this your own personal view?
A: In contemporary situations, a writer is more attracted to criticism than to praise. The overweight problem is both the fat man in me trying to get out and a comment on America's success in turning its global good luck into a kind of obesity. And children have become something to be trucked around. So that view, though harshly expressed, isn't one I'd disown.
Q: In both Witches and Widows, women have magical powers and men are helpless to resist them. One witch bluntly says, "The men we had children by...that was all they were good for." That does sound...harsh.
A: I'm trying to write from the witches' point of view, so maybe I exaggerate. But women are the race. They bear babies and are chiefly responsible for them. Men are just appendages, really-necessary accidents, but accidents nonetheless. And they're letting go of the patriarchal responsibility they have traditionally enjoyed.
Q: Do you find any compensation in what we euphemistically call the aging process?
A: Age has been kind to me so far. I've been able to keep working and get published. I can almost relax and look at the daisies. And age brings new pleasures. Travel becomes a phenomenon--seeing the world before you leave it.
Q: Your greatest achievements, in your view, would be...
A: That I'm a schoolteacher's son who wanted desperately to do something creative. I'm proud I've been able to function as a writer for half a century. I wanted to write about ordinary Americans and make them interesting. And [I'm proud of] my association with the New Yorker, which I aspired to since age 11.
Q: Ever suffer from writer's block?
A: Every day there's a struggle. I think, Is this worth doing? Am I doing it well? Then there's the gratuitousness of writing fiction--of writing about people who don't exist. But there are many privileges in a freelance, self-employed life. Writing every day is a small price.
Q: Give us a tour of the three desks you have at home.
A: We moved into an old summer-house built on a patrician scale. I took the maids' quarters, above the kitchen-four small rooms plus a bath. In the room with a wooden desk and a typewriter, I write mail. In the room with a steel desk and a view of the sea, I read proofs and write by hand. A third room has a white desk and a computer for final drafts and longer letters. And the fourth, where I read, has an easy chair.
Q: So what keeps you writing?
A: The hope of doing something I've never done before, coming up with something surprising for faithful readers. You want to justify the resources you're taking up, and writing is the only way I know to do that. It's wonderful to find one's own niche.
Excerpt"This town could use a makeover," said Sukie.
"It gets it, bit by bit," said Tommy. "New folks move in, with their own ideas. A sports bar with three screens plays different sports events every hour of the day and night. The young people all take to it. And there's a health center now. Exercise machines and so on."
"Yes, I saw all these people on treadmills. With headphones on, like a row of zombies. It was frightening."
--From The Widows of Eastwick