On John Updike and the Wallet

John Updike

Analysis of Ian McEwan's "On John Updike" and John Updike's "The Wallet"

In an article meant to eulogize the late, great writer John Updike, Ian McEwan makes a statement that is confusing unless one understands Updike's background. McEwan says that "This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God" (McEwan). The eulogizer makes the point that Updike was not troubled by God, but by the technology that had been increasing his confusion about the world he lived in. It is easy to see that the contention McEwan is making with relation to John Updike is that the author was comfortable with his conception of God through "long relationship" (McEwan), but he was uncomfortable with the change wrought in the world by an ever-increasing technology.

To reference this point McEwan uses the author himself, and an article/short story Updike wrote in 1985 called "The Wallet" (McEwan). As a man who had lived through almost a century's worth of changes, John Updike had gone from the age of simple automobiles to that of space travel. But, more simply, he had also gone from a time when he could rely on the fact that events would occur at a certain pace and care to a time when people were not as involved and the entire process seemed "impersonal" (Updike). "The Wallet" tells the seemingly simple story of a man who first seeks a large check he believes has been misplaced, and then finds that he has lost his wallet (Updike). The crux of the matter is that he has lost himself. In one part of the story Updike writes has the protagonist say "It was my wallet. Everything was in it. Everything. Without that wallet, I am nothing" (Updike). It is not that the man (Fulham, known only by his last name in the story) really believes that his entire life is wrapped up in the wallet, but that because the wallet is missing, he has no identity. The wallet, whose contents are described in detail by Updike, contains "credit cards, club membership cards, cash, personal pictures" (Updike) and other pieces of a life. Because, Fulham has put his entire self-worth into the wallet, when he loses it he loses himself.

Relating the story back to John Updike is at once simple and difficult. When an author writes a story, any story, they are, in part, leaving a piece of themselves (McEwan). In his story about a man losing his wallet. Updike relates some of his own issues. The reason that it is difficult to see Updike in the narrative for one is that he was not beyond the peak of his powers when he wrote the story (McEwan). "The Wallet" came out in Yankee Magazine in 1985; Updike would win a second Pulitzer Prize, for Rabbit at Rest, in 1990 (McEwan). Thus, the feeling that Fulham had of being diminished in importance by his retirement does not seem to be the case with Updike. As another contrast, Fulham was in his seventies and had probably been forced to retire from his Wall Street brokerage house, where Updike was only 53 when he wrote the story. However, Updike may have related to the irritation his character feels, the impotence, when things started to go wrong. This is the simple part of the comparison. Fulham is rehearsing his new, retired life at one point in the story, and he thinks that life was much easier when he was sitting behind a desk being attended to, and shielded from reality by, "swift-moving, enameled secretaries to shield and buttress him and to turn his hesitant murmurs of dictation into official communications on stiff company stationery" (Updike). Life used to be so easy, and not it is complicated by the new ways things are done. Updike, as someone in late middle age, could sympathize with the confusion and unimportance that was gripping Fulham. At the end of the story, of course, Fulham regains both his wallet and is delivered the check. He looks at both, realizes that he has lost the world that was known to him, and knows that he is ready to die.

The contention that McEwan makes is that Updike could understand Fulham because Updike was always at the point where he did not fear death (he knew God), but he did fear progress (McEwan). The point at the beginning of the eulogy that Updike "was troubled by science as others are troubled by God" is shown in "The Wallet" (McEwan). Throughout his writings, as McEwan points out, Updike has his characters demonstrate their comfort with God. In many of the Rabbit novels, Updike makes God one of the central characters of the books because of his comfort with Him. Updike showed that he had an understanding of God that came from his upbringing as a good Lutheran boy. What he wanted to do in his writing was show how the protestant world he had grown up in related to actual reality (McEwan). But, technology was a puzzle and a consternation. It is interesting to see Fulham's fond glance back at the time when he was shielded by his "enameled secretaries" (Updike). He did not have to deal with the outside world. All Fulham had to do was concentrate on the job he had been given, and that he was good at, and leave the outside world to others. Unfortunately he was thrown into that outside world when he retired. His wife was busy with her golf and other activities, and would not slow her life to shield him from reality. So, when the check was late and the wallet went missing, he had to deal with those realities by himself rather than rely on the machine his business had created to take care of it.