One by one, the great trees of the forest are falling. John Updike has died. I can't even begin to formulate my thoughts. Reading his Rabbit novels during my college years in Bangladesh was the ultimate experience in literary immersion. Through the life of Rabbit, they transported me body and soul into postwar middle America -- from what I found in those books, nobody ever wrote a finer work about that specific time and place and people than Updike.
He's dead now. Pinter is dead. Solzhenitsyn is dead. Mailer is dead. Saul Bellow is dead. Vonnegut is dead.
Who's left? Of that great generation of American writers, only Philip Roth now survives. It'll be his time soon. And then time will carry off Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford too. They fed me when I was hungry, they showed me what books can do. A boy growing up in a faraway country spending many afternoons in the second-hand bookshops, hunting for the great American classics, delighted at finding The Grapes of Wrath, overjoyed after buying that very first Rabbit novel or Ford's The Sportswriter out of his hard-saved rickshaw money.
Those guys, they exploded firecrackers full of ambition and talent and made the American novel the big beast of the literary jungle, wholly devouring the small-minded parochial British fiction of the 50s, 60s and 70s (that an Anglosphere lad had all the easy access to) until Rushdie & Amis breathed some life back into the patient. But the Americans never did look back. Even now you have novelists like Powers and Chabon and the black box continues to spit out a diamond in the rough like Junot Diaz.
Because these guys had the guts to swing for the fences. Sometimes they missed, but when they hit that baby, it stayed hit. It sailed right out of the ballpark, smashed windscreens in the carpark. Once you've read the Rabbit Angstroms, the Frank Bascombes, the Blood Meridians and the Border Trilogies, the late Roths, nothing in fiction reads the same again. You hanker for that range, that scale, that ambition, that sheer bloody-minded display of genius.
Gone gone gone. It's moments like these that bring me so low. I'm fucking disconsolate just now. Consider this my tribute to a great American writer, finally at rest today.