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John Updike
 (1932–2009), 
whose 1963 novel 
The Centaur 
has an epigraph from Karl Barth. “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to 
man, earth the creation conceivable to him,” Barth observes 
here. “He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.” All 
Updike’s major characters inhabit this boundary between heaven and earth, between 
the intensity of life and the inevitability of death, between dreams of freedom and 
the comforts of a compromised, suburban environment. “I feel to be a person is to 
be in a situation of tension,” Updike once explained. “A truly adjusted person is not 
a person at all.” So characters like George Caldwell (
The Centaur
), Harry Angstrom 
(in the four novels, 
Rabbit, Run 
(1960), 
Rabbit Redux 
(1971), 
Rabbit is Rich 
(1981), 
Rabbit at Rest 
(1990) and recalled in the novella 
Rabbit Remembered 
(2001)), Piet 
Hanoma (
Couples 
(1968)), Henry Bech (
Bech: A Book 
(1970), 
Bech is Back 
(1982)), 
Roger Lambert (
Roger’s Version 
(1986)), Clarence Wilmot, his son Ted, granddaughter Esther, and great-
grandson Clark (
In the Beauty of Lilies 
(1996)), and even the 
Muslim fundamentalist Ahmad in 
Terrorist 
(2006) all perform and pursue their 
maladjustments in what is called, in 
Couples
, “a universe of timing”: enacting the 
beauty, and the terror, of their own duality. So, in 
The Centaur
, George Caldwell, 
an aging schoolteacher, is having to come to terms with his own decline and imminent death. “I’m a 
walking junk-heap,” he declares, announcing an obsession with 
waste, human and universal, that runs through Updike’s fiction. In 
Couples
, for 
instance, Piet Hanoma similarly suffers from a “dizzying impression of waste” and a 
“sense of unconnection among phenomena and of feeling.” As a teacher of evolution, Caldwell can reflect 
on a time “when consciousness was a mere pollen drifting 
in darkness” and on his own annihilation: from nothing and to nothing. His mind is 
preoccupied with the wasting of nature. “I hate Nature. It reminds me of death,” 
he insists bitterly. All things – cars, houses, people, landscapes – fall apart, revert to 
zero. “Things never fail to fail,” Caldwell tells himself. 
Against this entropic vision, this dread of the void, is set the possibility of love. 
“A man in love ceases to fear death,” Updike observed in one of his essays. “Our fundamental anxiety is 
that we do not exist – or will cease to exist. Only in being loved 
do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly 
assigns itself.” There is also what Updike has called the “brainless celebration of the 
fact of existence”: like the carnival celebrations that conclude his first novel, 
The Poorhouse Fair 
(1959). And there are the comforts of the customary, routine and 
structure. Piet Hanoma in 
Couples
, for instance, comes from a family of builders and 
is a dedicated carpenter. Grappling with materials helps him to fend off a sense of 
the void. “He needed to touch a tool. Grab the earth,” the reader is told. “All houses, 
all things that endured, pleased Piet”; they give him a self-stabilizing pragmatism, 
a feeling of “space secured.” And yet such is the duality, the constant vacillation of 
Updike’s characters, they can also feel like a prison some times. The void is terrifying 
but maybe liberating; the structures of houses, the suburbs, suburban routine, may 
be comforting but they can also be claustrophobic. And Updike always returns to the 
fundamental intimation that structures waste away too, they are part of “the world’s 

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downward skid.” “I think books should have secrets, like people do,” Updike has said. 
And the secret his own books disclose is the imminence of the void, the dread fear