Why do you think Dickens wrote? Why do you think he got so up in arms about how American publishers were operating under a looser copyright regime at the time and were therefore publishing his works without paying him, even though he got full credit?
Hell, how many works did Mozart write simply to finance his lush lifestyle?
I thought banality was not a sad accident for Updike, but rather his goal: to show the banality of suburban life. Still doesn’t make him worth reading; he succeeded too well, too often.
I was talking about movies whose sole aim is to make money with zero message, insight or emotion. Don’t tell me they don’t exist.
Of course great artists are also interested in making money. They have to live. But it’s not the main goal of their work. And it’s definitely not the case for their masterpieces.
I like Updike. He captures the C20th existential angst of the run-of-the-mill man quite well; Rabbit is a really good portrayal of the man just bright enough to realise the pointlessness of it all but not articulate enough to express it. Reminds me of a lot of Bruce Springsteen’s music, or even characters like Tony Soprano or Walter White; the sort of ineffectual howl of outrage of a demographic - white men - who are not as necessary as they used to be. Yeah, it’s ridiculous at times, especially when he tries to create female or (most noticeably) black characters; but he does white guys well. That’s more than most writers manage. (And computer games aren’t art. Not yet. Well, maybe some of them are getting there.)
I value the Rabbit books partly because of their insider’s POV on a (somehwat) alien culture.
Maybe Updike falls into somewhat the same category as Sinclair Lewis: much less widely read now than when he was originally writing, and mainly valuable for how he captured a now-vanished American time and culture.
It just now occurred to me to wonder whether the similarity of “Rabbit” to “Babbitt” was intentional.