Bob Batchelor’s podcast John Updike: American Writer, American Life is active again. The new episode is titled “Why You Should Be Reading John Updike: The; Writer Who Predicted Everything.”
From the site: “Hosted by cultural historian and Updike biographer Bob Batchelor, each episode is focused, sharp, and built for listeners who want to dive into the life and career of one of America’s greatest writers.
“Updike saw the death of American manufacturing. He wrote about economic anxiety before it became a political movement. He diagnosed the collapse of masculine identity before the culture had a vocabulary for it. He saw the 1970s energy crisis, not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a permanent reckoning with American assumptions about prosperity and progress. And he did it all in beautiful, lyrial sentences.
“He also wrote things that make contemporary readers uncomfortable. His male characters objectify and flee. His perspective is overwhelmingly white and suburban. This podcast doesn’t hide from those tensions. It engages them, because honest conversations about American literature require addressing human complexity, not running from it.
“Each episode takes one aspect of Updike’s life, work, or world and opens it up: the Pennsylvania mill town that shaped him, the New Yorker years that refined his voice, the feminist critique that shadowed his reputation, the beautiful and brutal sentences that remain his most enduring legacy. From the Rabbit novels to Couples to Terrorist—from Updike’s poetry to his art criticism—no corner of the work is off limits.”
