Updike on Pynchon

[Mark Woollams]

Newly published interview from 1978 with John Updike

The entire article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/10/american-centaur-an-interview-with-john-updike.html 

The specific questions:

Hadžiselimović: What is your position vis-a-vis other modern, contemporary novelists in America; vis-a-vis the innovative or absurd fiction, as some have called it; guys like Sorrentino, Sukenick, Wurlitzer, Pynchon, Barthelme, John Barth? Do you feel your art and messages as being different from theirs, and if so, how?
Updike: I’ve seen myself critically opposed to this school. I don’t feel opposed to it. I’m very unevenly acquainted with the writers you mention. Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from. I think Barthelme’s stories of the sixties were really very liberating as far as what one could do with a short story, and I know that my own short stories have been influenced by his. Also, like Hemingway, he’s a great simplifier or stripper away of verbal nonsense. After reading enough Barthelme, your own stories tend to become a little shorter and cleaner and more spasmodic. John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m
 saying. His last novel, Chimera, which is really a series of novellas, was essentially about the kind of marital breakup and re-synthesis that I have written about. Pynchon I do feel more alien to; I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.
Hadžiselimović: Has he turned up?
Updike: People know him. I’ve never met him, but Barthelme I know is a fairly good friend and he does have a physical existence. I think he lives in California and has lived in Mexico. Indeed, he attended my wife’s alma mater of Cornell, where I’m sure Pynchon scholars have looked up his examinations. Strange to say, he, like my wife, took a course with the late Vladimir Nabokov when he taught at Cornell, and Mrs. Nabokov remembered Pynchon’s handwriting. Evidently, she was the one who corrected the exams. So Pynchon, like Salinger, does exist. But he is hard to find. Even as I give one interview after another in Yugoslavia, I sympathize with the wish to not give interviews. I think it is not merely that these men are being perverse or playing games with their public, but there’s something polluting about expressing opinions beyond what you express in your fiction. In other words, I have opinions; every man has opinions. But they are really
 only opinions and they are of interest only because of what I have written. So, in a way, I don’t mind Pynchon’s staying out of public life. This is sort of a byway. I am not among those who has found much comfort in Pynchon. As to so-called black humor, which is maybe a passé phrase, it did seem to me at its best to be true enough and to 
correspond with a quality of, at least, American life in the sixties. I think of some of my own themes as at least humorous and gray, if not black. Perhaps I can be enlisted as a gray humorist, not a black one.