A Conversation with John Updike [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 369-384]

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LENKA PROCHAZKOVA
do still. So I would certainly hope-that my best book is ahead of
me.
Q: It seems to me that you deprive your heroines of all their secrets,
don't you think so?
A: Well-it's an interesting idea that I deprive my heroines of secrets.
I try to describe my heroines and my heroes as fully as I can and to,
at the end of the book, leave the reader with the sense that he knows
them fairly well. I don't think that characters should retain their
secrets from the author, or from the reader either. I am interested
of course, as we all are in America, in women. There has been a significant change in the way men are invited to regard women, and
there's certainly a change in the way women regard themselves. So
that, in my own way and using what material my life has brought
me, I have tried to write about being a woman-being a woman in
twentieth century America. My suspicion is-is that try as I will-that
these women do still have their secrets which I haven't deprived them of.
Q: What are you most afraid of when you start a new novel?
A: Well, I'm afraid of wasting my time, and writing a bad one, or afraid
a novel, that as sometimes happens, will go for a hundred or two pages
and then die on the-you begin a novel hoping that it will take on
life, a kind of life you didn't foresee, and I suppose that my main
fear when I begin is that this will not happen. Some days in the course
of writing a book demand a certain amount of patience and faith
that the thing will come to life. But if I have a fear it's that it will
not come to life, but remain-for some reason, some flaw in myself
or in my intentions-it will remain dead.
Q: You are a man of order. Shall I take it that you profess strict discipline
at work?
A: Not strict, but approximate. I've been privileged to work as a selfemployed writer, and surely the least I can do to deserve that privilege
is to work steadily, as most men and women work in their jobs. After
all we don't think there's anything heroic about a dentist or a nurse
or an insurance salesman getting up every day and doing his job, so
there's no reason why we should admire a writer for getting up every
day and trying to do his job. And now that I'm in my fifties and have
a certain amount of attention paid to me, I must try to discriminate
between important and unimportant work. When I was young all
my work was important because nobody asked me to do anything,