John Updike, one of the U.S.’s most prolific and respected writers, died
yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 76. As a novelist, short story
writer, poet and critic, Updike was a man of many talents. Despite
unevenness in quality, all of his output reflected a formal elegance
that can rarely be seen today.
Updike was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine where an archive of
his work going back to 1955 can be read. A May 26, 2008 short story
titled “The Full Glass” is in the voice of an 80 year old man reflecting
back on his life. Although the character’s job was refinishing floors,
his twilight reflections are drawn from Updike’s own intimations of
mortality. The prose has Updike’s characteristically shimmering beauty
as well as capturing the character’s personality in a few brush strokes:
"Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a
man I know but not intimately. Normally I have no use for introspection.
My employment for thirty years, refinishing wood floors-carried on
single-handedly out of a small white truck, a Chevrolet Spartan, with
the several sizes of electric sanders and the belts and disks of
sandpaper in all their graded degrees of coarseness and five-gallon
containers of polyurethane and thinner and brushes ranging from a stout
six-inch width to a diagonally cut two-inch sash brush for tight corners
and jigsaw-fitted thresholds-has conditioned me against digging too
deep. Balancing in a crouch on the last dry boards like a Mohawk steel
walker has taught me the value of the superficial, of that wet second
coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard. All it needs and asks is
twenty-four undisturbed hours to dry in. Some of these fine old New
England floors, especially the hard yellow pine from the Carolinas that
was common in the better homes a hundred years ago, but also the newer
floors of short tongued pieces of oak or maple, shock you with their
carefree gouges and cigarette burns and the black scuff marks synthetic
soles leave. Do people still give that kind of party? I entered this
trade, after fifteen years in a white-collar, smooth-talking line of
work, as a refugee from romantic disgrace, and abstain from passing
judgment, even on clients arrogant enough to schedule a dinner party six
hours after I give their hall parquet the finish coat."
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/john-updike/
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