Updike’s take on Jong’s Fear of Flying

As part of their feminist classics series which looks at influential books, The Conversation featured an article on “Sex, zips and feminism: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying has a joyful abandon rarely found in today’s sad girl novels” in which John Updike was quoted.

“Interestingly though, another male writer, John Updike, helped Jong’s rise up the bestseller list. Even so, his compliments can read as backhanded as Goodlove’s:

It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose.

“Updike favourably links Jong with great male writers J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth, while carefully distinguishing her from the more disagreeable women’s liberationists:

Fear of Flying not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of ‘raised’ feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint.

“Pull quotes from Updike’s review featured on the novel’s second edition (the one I have been reading), along with a new cover: a luscious 70s serif typeface in black and orange on a yellow background that blatantly copies the 1969 cover of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Updike’s Couples makes The Atlantic’s redefined Great American Novels list

The Great Gatsby is often cited as a contender for that elusive (and purely speculative) title of “Great American Novel,” and editors of The Atlantic used that novel as a starting point for reconsidering what that term actually means in order to construct their own list of “The Great American Novels.”

The editors decided to define “American” as having been first published in the U.S., they narrowed the field to the past 100 years (“a period that began as literary modernism was cresting”), and they approached “scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it” asking for suggestions. Their aim: “the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose.” That resulted in a list of 136 books, and if you break that list down by decades it looks like this: 7 from the ’20s, 9 from the ’30s, 7 from the ’40s, 13 from the ’50s, 15 from the ’60s, 19 from the ’70s, 12 from the ’80s, 16 from the ’90s, 14 from the ’00s, 21 from the ’10s, and 3 from the current young decade—reflecting, perhaps, a fairly large familiarity factor based on the ages of those who weighed in.

“This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction [Updike’s two winners from the Rabbit series didn’t make the cut], and three children’s books. . . . At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before.”

Of Couples, one of the editors writes, “Couples caused a scandal when it was first published, but it was easy for Updike to weather. Having written a novel about suburban adultery before such novels were commonplace, he anticipated some outrage. No matter: The fainting-couch wailing only made him more famous. But what did matter to Updike were the friendships that he nuked. The book was a thinly disguised ethnography of his bored and prosperous social set in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which was torn between rigid WASPy mores and the enticements of the sexual revolution. Not all of his friends forgave him. How could they? It’s one thing to have your dinner-party pretensions and proto-polyamory exposed on the page. It’s quite another to have them rendered in precise lyrical prose by an all-time great American stylist. Nearly 60 years on, their loss is still our gain.”

Academics wanted for Updike encyclopedia entries

The online Literary Encyclopedia is commissioning entries on the works of John Updike. Entries are usually between 1500 and 2500 words and deadlines can be negotiated according to the needs of the individual contributor. Please contact the editor of the Encyclopedia, Grace Moore (grace.moore@otago.ac.nz) if you are interested in writing one or more entries. Entries may be by academics at any career stage, including PhD candidates and early career scholars. Authors receive free access to the publication, which contains almost 10,000 peer-reviewed articles.

  1. Rabbit, Run
  2. Rabbit Redux
  3. Rabbit is Rich
  4. Rabbit at Rest
  5. Couples
  6. The Centaur
  7. Of the Farm
  8. The Witches of Eastwick
  9. The Widows of Eastwick
  10. Bech: A Book
  11. Bech is Back
  12. Bech at Bay
  13. Gertrude and Claudius
  14. My Father’s Tears, and Other Stories
  15. Too Far to Go
  16. Problems, and Other Stories
  17. Pigeon Feathers
  18. The Same Door
  19. The Music School
  20. Museums and Women
  21. The Afterlife, and Other Stories
  22. Toward the End of Time
  23. Seek My Face
  24. The Poorhouse Fair
  25. Marry Me
  26. The Coup
  27. Brazil
  28. Trust Me
  29. Villages
  30. Memories of the Ford Administration
  31. Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, ‘Rabbit Remembered’
  32. Self-Consciousness
  33. Endpoint, and Other Poems
  34. Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism
  35. More Matter: Essays and Criticism
  36. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
  37. Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism
  38. Hugging the Shore
  39. Picked-Up Pieces
  40. Just Looking: Essays on Art
  41. Still Looking: Essays on American Art
  42. Facing Nature: Poems
  43. Americana and Other Poems
  44. Telephone Poles
  45. Tossing and Turning
  46. The Carpentered Hen, and Other Tamed Creatures
  47. Buchanan Dying
  48. The Early Stories: 1953-1975
  49. Collected Poems, 1953-1993
  50. Seventy Poems
  51. Golf Dreams
  52. Jester’s Dream

In Memoriam: Myrtle Council

We’re saddened to report the passing of Myrtle Council, an avid and knowledgeable local historian who was an honored guest at the grand opening of The John Updike Childhood Home in October 2021. She was 99.

Myrtle was a 1941 graduate of Shillington High School, and after serving in the Navy WAVES during WWII she worked at the Reading Eagle-Times, Jacobs Aircraft Engineering Co., and Edelman’s Law Office in Reading.

But Berks County knew her mostly from her extensive volunteerism and advocacy for the preservation of local history. The list of organizations she served is almost as long as her rich life. She was a member of the National Parliamentarians Association, the American Institute of Parliamentarians, Berks Unit of PAP, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the PA Federation of Women’s Clubs, Southeastern District of PFWC, Berks County Federation of Women’s Clubs, Women’s Club of Shillington, Federation of Past Presidents Club, and the Shillington/Mifflin Alumni Association, frequently serving as president or a board member of those organizations. She was also a lifetime member of the Immanuel UCC, Shillington, where she was a youth group leader, Altar Guild Chairman, founder/leader of the Shawl Ministry for 10 years, and a kitchen helper.

Her intersecting interests of Shillington High School, John Updike, and local history and its preservation led her to take an active role in passing on archival materials that the Shillington/Mifflin Alumni Association had acquired to the John Updike Childhood Home, where some items could be displayed and others catalogued and safely protected for the future. Items currently at the house museum—including Shillington H.S. pennants, pins, hats, athletic letters, and a student handbook—are on display because of Myrtle’s vision and dedication to preserving local history for future generations to understand and appreciate.

Inurnment, with full military honors, will take place in Fairview Cemetery, 375 New Holland Ave., Shillington, at 10 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2023. A celebration of life service will follow at 11 a.m. at Immanuel United Church of Christ, 99 S. Waverly St., Shillington. The family will receive friends immediately following services in the church fellowship hall.

Contributions in memory of Myrtle Council can be made to Immanuel UCC at the above address. Here is a link to the obituary where memories can be shared.

The society sends its deepest sympathies to Myrtle’s daughter, Elizabeth, and to the rest of the family. Myrtle will be missed, but her work lives on.

Technological University Dublin lecturer named 1st Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow

 

The selection committee for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship has chosen Dr. Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Technological University Dublin, to serve as the first fellow in residence.

The Fellowship, which will be offered annually by The John Updike Society, consists of a $1000 honorarium and a two-week residency at the Mission Hill Casitas within the Skyline Country Club in Tucson, Arizona. Updike owned and wrote from the Casitas during a part of each year between 2004 and 2009. Located in the Catalina Foothills with a spectacular view of Tucson, the Casitas (pictured below) are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, who generously donated the two-week stay.

Robert M. Luscher, who oversaw the selection process, said the committee chose Norton because of the important contributions that her proposed projects make to Updike studies. During her residency, Norton will work on a critical essay (tentatively titled “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus”) and make initial progress on the proposal for an edited collection of essays to celebrate the centenary of Updike’s birth—a volume encouraged by the literary editor at Bloomsbury Publishing.

Norton, whose work has appeared in The Journal of Scholarly PublishingThe ExplicatorThe Irish Journal of American StudiesThe John Updike Review, and other books and journals, previously co-edited two volumes of essays with JUS member Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Clasroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Norton came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. Her first article on Updike (The John Updike Review, 2014) was on the “regulating daughter” in the Rabbit novels. She has maintained an interest in the treatment of girls and women in Updike’s writing and beyond. It is on this topic that she will focus during her residency as the 2024 Fellow at the Tucson Casitas.

John Updike was one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He was also among just a handful of Americans to be awarded both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal, which are presented in White House ceremonies. He is widely know for his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, which fellow writer Ian McEwan said was his choice for Great American Novel. Updike also wrote poems, and many of the poems published in his final volume, Endpoint, were written at the Casitas.

Writer-scholar residencies in the U.S. are highly competitive and prestigious. Details on the 2025 fellowship and other grants offered by The John Updike Society can be found here.

Updike scholar researches Twain and Updike at Twain’s summer home

James Plath, whose most recent published criticism—”Updike’s ‘Wife-Wooing’: The Seven Year Itch and the Soliloquy of Seduction”—appeared in The John Updike Review Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2023), recently spent two weeks researching an essay on Mark Twain and John Updike as a Quarry Farm Fellow.

Quarry Farm, in Elmira, NY,  was the home of Twain’s sister-in-law and where Twain and his family spent their summers for more than 20 years. It was the place where Twain said Huck Finn and all his other major fictional characters were born, a place where he wrote most of his best-known works.

Recently Plath (pictured above by the study in which Twain did most of his writing) contributed a “testimonial” about his stay at Quarry Farm. Here’s the link.

Sofia University scholar writes on Updike’s ‘The Bulgarian Poetess’

Alexandra K. Glavanakova, of Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski, recently published an essay on “Authenticity and Autofiction: John Updike’s ‘The Bulgarian Poetess'” online at escholarship.org, where a full-text version is available.

ABSTRACT:  This article provides an innovative perspective on John Updike’s visit to Eastern Europe in the 1960s, including Bulgaria, as reflected in his short story “The Bulgarian Poetess” first published in The New Yorker on March 13, 1965. The inspiration for this interpretation is as much academic as it is anthropological. It comes from Updike’s use of my own surname, Glavanakova, which is not a common Slavic one, for the fictional character of the real-life Bulgarian poetess he met, whom researchers have established to be Blaga Dimitrova. Many have delved into the text aiming at a detailed and, more significantly, an authentic reconstruction of events, places and people appearing in the story (Katsarova 2010; Kosturkov 2012; Briggs and Dojčinović 2015). A main preoccupation of these analyses has been to establish the degree of factual distortion in Updike’s representation of the people and places behind the Iron Curtain. The pervasive imagery of the mirror, implying both its reflecting and doubling function, and the repetitive use of cognates associated with truth and honesty in the story suggest the focus of this article, which falls on the dynamics between authenticity and artifice from the perspective of autofiction by way of illustrating how one culture translates into another “at the opposite side[s] of the world” (Updike, “The Bulgarian Poetess”). In my interpretation, autofiction opens ample spaces for representations and discussions of identity and self-/reflexivity in a transcultural context.

“The Bulgarian Poetess” was published in the March 6, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. Here is the link.

 

Journalist recalls being Updike’s muse, returns to Shillington

Not everyone who recognizes themselves in a writer’s fiction or poetry is pleased, but William Ecenbarger took delight in recalling his 1983 interview with John Updike that inspired Updike to write “One More Interview.” Then a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ecenbarger managed to score his interview with Updike through the writer’s mother, Linda. It was no ordinary interview.

For this one, Updike got in a car with Ecenbarger and gave him a personally narrated tour of “Updike country”: Shillington, Plowville, and Reading-area boyhood haunts that factored into his fiction and poetry. That interview was partially quoted in the first chapter of Adam Begley’s biography of Updike and included in complete form in John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews.

Ecenbarger recalled that 1983 interview and a more recent trip he made to The John Updike Childhood Home in “John Updike’s Muse,” published on the InTheKnow Traveler.

Here’s the link.

 

Art Garfunkel includes Updike on hefty favorites list

Most lists are Top Ten or Top 100, but no one ever accused Art Garfunkel—the quieter half of the Simon & Garfunkel folk-rock duo—of being like “most.” The singer decided to log each book he read, beginning in 1968—the year that the duo’s “Mrs. Robinson,” written for The Graduate soundtrack, won Grammy Record of the Year.

Garfunkel shared all 1195 books with fans in 2013. Since then, he’s whittled down the list to 157 favorite books. Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. Read about the rest of Art Garfunkel’s favorite books in this Nov. 18, 2023 Far Out article by Jordan Potter.