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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.
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