John Updike’s death makes me think of a glorious few days reading

Posted on January 27th, 2009 by Scott Stein

In the summer of 2000, about a year after we married, my wife and I went to Montana’s Glacier National Park and stayed for a couple of days in Many Glacier Lodge surrounded by Swiftcurrent Lake and towering mountains. After hiking, we read in a stiff breeze on the massive back porch overlooking the lake and at night around the huge firepit in the great hall, sitting by the crackling warmth with two dozen strangers. Then we drove Going to the Sun Road and stayed in the Village Inn on the other side of the park. Our second-floor window faced Lake McDonald. The inn was on the shore, not more than 10 yards from the water. We canoed and hiked and in the morning pulled up green plastic chairs to the shore’s edge and read as the water lapped the pebbled beach, before we headed to Banff, where we read a bit less because of all there was to see and do.

The book I read in Montana was John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius. The events of the novel take place before and lead up to the events of Hamlet. It’s a love story. Poor Gertrude falls in love with the King’s brother, Claudius. Claudius is in love with her. The King, cold and pragmatic and concerned with his own power, stands in the way of their love, which is as genuine as any love you’re going to find in an Updike novel. I don’t think I’m giving away plot points when I tell you that the King is eventually killed. It is a testament to Updike’s prose that the suspense is not lessened by every reader knowing how his novel must end. In the afterword, Updike must have taken great delight in tweaking his readers with this final thought (from William Kerrigan’s Hamlet’s Perfection):

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.

In his book-length fiction, I prefer Updike when he veers from his home territory as he does in Gertrude and Claudius. True, this is a novel with adultery at the center, but it didn’t seem to me that cheating is the point of it. I like every character in this book more than I like Rabbit Angstrom, whose self-absorption bored me early in the first volume. The Rabbit novels are mentioned prominently in all of the obituaries today, along with the prizes and where Updike ranks among great American authors. But when I heard that he’d died, I didn’t think of any of that. I thought of the glorious few days reading an entertaining and beautifully written book about earthbound royalty, with majestic mountains all around.