John Updike's The Coup

 I read Updike's The Coup while in prison. Not that I did not know of Updike. I had seen him speak at Clowes Hall, I owned a copy of Pigeon Feathers, I knew about Rabbit Angstrom - I failed to read him because I gave up on fiction writing before I started law school.

So came to Updike to fill a hole in my education. The prison leisure library had several of Updike's novels, so I read The Coup. My notes are still in a box - somewhere, I hope. My recollection is that I liked the novel. The Rabbit Novels had perplexed me, and not in a good way. I do not recall being annoyed by The Coup.

However, I could not understand why Updike had the reputation that he had. Listening to Ninety-Nine Novels: The Coup by John Updike, the Updike scholar explained why he should be considered a Great American Novelist - not for any one of his novels (none hitting the mark as great in and of itself) but for the whole of his works. Which, to me, makes Updike not the American Dickens but the American Balzac. 

The video made me think I was not wrong to see value in The Coup (and The Terrorist). Do give the video a listen.

Some items turned up while looking for links to add to this post:

No Way: John Updike’s latest novel reveals his tin ear for critical times by Christopher Hitchens (The Atlantic) - ouch.

The Coup review (Russell A. Hunt, 1979)

In spite of that, there are lots of readers who get from Updike the same bracing whiff of irony, like the sparkling air when it's twenty below the morning after a blizzard, that they get from Jane Austen or George Meredith. It's for such readers that I report that The Coup is not what they had in mind, at all. There's irony, but it's no longer the irony of the poet laureate of Westchester: mostly it's a direct political irony of a kind quite unlike the scalpel we're used to in Updike's hands. Here it's a double-bladed axe. One side sinks crunchingly into the pretensions of a North American society that knows what's best for all the peoples of the world: WonderBras and Spam and Big Macs and Buicks. The other blade, with less crunch but possibly even more finality, disembowels the fallacies of political fanaticism (in this case, it's a Marxist / Moslem variety, but the specific subspecies is not, one suspects, a crucial issue for Updike.)

sch 11/14