Art & Creativity Quote by John Updike

Updike’s compass point is a small act of aesthetic defiance, and it’s aimed squarely at America’s literary power grid. New York stands in for the publishing industry’s gravitational pull: trend, prestige, the knowing wink of insiders who read to be seen reading. By swiveling “a little to the east of Kansas,” he signals a different sovereign: the broad, plausibly middle-class reader who doesn’t live inside the coastal conversation but still wants language that respects their intelligence.

The genius is in the phrase “vague spot.” He isn’t pandering to a demographic with a zip code; he’s constructing an imagined audience that functions as a moral check. Vague means flexible, a moving target that keeps the writer honest. It’s also a quiet critique of how cultural capital works: specificity, in this case, is less democratic. If you write “toward New York,” you risk turning fiction into a password system. If you write toward Kansas-adjacent vagueness, you’re betting that seriousness can travel without being stamped with metropolitan approval.

Context matters: Updike became the canonical chronicler of postwar suburbia, a world often dismissed as bland until he treated it as a site of erotic, spiritual, and civic consequence. The line protects that project. It’s not anti-elite so much as anti-echo-chamber: a novelist insisting that style can be immaculate without being clubby, and that the center of American life doesn’t need to ask permission from the coasts to be worth describing.