Blogger discovers, reviews HUGGING THE SHORE

269332For Dorothy Borders, who writes “The Nature of Things” blog, John Updike was “a master wordsmith.” In Hugging the Shore by John Updike: A review” of Updike’s 1983 collection of essays and criticism, she notes,

“He could string words together with the best of them, and it is a pleasure to read his smooth and flowing sentences, even when those sentences were written on a subject that didn’t necessarily interest me, like golf. Just to view his writerly craftsmanship was an instruction to the art of writing. I expect I will continue to dip into this book for months to come.”

Updike urinalia? Opinion piece quotes WOE

Screen Shot 2014-01-16 at 7.54.04 AMYou never know what line from an Updike book is going to be quoted and used in an article. In an ed-op piece titled “Has the urinal had its day?” (posted January 11, 2014), HeraldScotland.com senior features writer Barry Didcock begins,

“I don’t have the paperback to hand so I’m relying on my fading memory of the novel, but there’s a line in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick in which one of the female protagonists talks about men ‘lording it’ over the toilet bowl.

“She’s referring to their—our—ability to pee standing up.”

Didcock uses that quote as a springboard to a speculative discussion of how the urinal may be nearing the end of its life. But he doesn’t consider sporting events or concerts. Without urinals, the lines at those events would be as interminably long as they are for women.

A look inside Adam Begley’s UPDIKE

Amazon.com usually offers a “look inside” so you can see the Table of Contents of a book or read an excerpt, but they haven’t done that yet for Adam Begley’s forthcoming (April 8) biography of John Updike. So we thought we’d provide that service. A review will come later, but for now, here’s a peek inside Updike, which will be published by HarperCollins:

Table of Contents
Introduction
I. A Tour of Berks County
II. The Harvard Years
III. The Talk of the Town
IV. Welcome to Tarbox
V. The Two Iseults
VI. Couples
VII. Updike Abroad
VIII. Tarbox Redux
IX. Marrying Martha
X. Haven Hill
XI. The Lonely Fort
XII. Endpoint
Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments
Index

Continue reading

New Yorker blogpost on Writers and Rum mentions Updike

Screen Shot 2014-01-12 at 9.51.34 AMOn January 9, 2014, Adam Gopnik posted a think piece on The New Yorker website titled “Writers and Rum,” in which he writes,

“At the other, soberer end, John Updike once said to an admirer that the reason for the astonishing longevity he shared with Philip Roth—not just achieving the second acts that Fitzgerald said were impossible in American lives but third acts and fourth acts and then both men appearing, so to speak, out in the lobby to shake hands and do card tricks after the show—was, simply, that neither drank. He brought it up because he knew it was unusual.  Growing up, he had absorbed the notion that a good writer wasn’t just possibly a drunk; a good writer had to be a drunk to be any good at all. . . .”

Updike house deconstruction moving right along

volunteersThe outside of The John Updike Childhood Home has been recently painted, and with a break in the weather volunteers from Habitat for Humanity of Berks County and Bellman’s Church got together to strip wallpaper from the living room and downstairs hallways and to remove newer floor tiles that had been added when the house was converted to a business.

Habitat’s Russell Poper, Director of Construction for the Updike project, had much good news to report:  they removed half of the tiles downstairs without causing damage to the original flooring, and they were able to locate a clean “footprint” on the floor showing the shape and exact placement of the original room divider. The Society will try to rebuild the house as it was when Updike lived there, and that means putting back the living room divider, re-establishing the wall and door in Updike’s bedroom that led to a “black rifleroom,” and eventually reconstructing a grape arbor that dominated the side of the house.

Poper also said the group discovered a drawing of a rifle on the foyer wall when they stripped off the wallpaper. It could be Updike’s, since we know he was allowed to draw on the upstairs hallway walls, or it could be something the Hunters (who bought the house later) tried and abandoned. Needless to say, we’ll be investigating! Anyone with information about the drawing should contact curator Maria Mogford: mmogford@alb.edu. Pictured above are the volunteers working this past weekend in the living room, and the rifle they uncovered in the foyer.

The John Updike Society is grateful to the volunteers who’ve been helping to turn the house into a community showpiece.

BBC’s Great Lives series focuses on John Updike

Screen Shot 2014-01-09 at 8.29.25 AMSeveral days ago the BBC ran a program that the website is listing as “David Baddiel on John Updike.” Click on the pop-up option and you’ll be able to hear the 30-minute broadcast.

“There can be few successful novelists who so divide critical opinion,” Matthew Parris begins. “John Updike was one of the 20th century’s most read of serious American writers” whose style charmed most critics, but, he adds, most famously not Harold Bloom, who called him a minor novelist with a major style.

Parris talks to guest David Baddiel, who builds a case for John Updike, as well as Justin Cartwright, a novelist himself.

“I think it’s a huge mistake to think that the ‘mundane’ is easier to write,” Cartwright says, comparing Updike to George Eliot and Jane Austen.

Begley buzz: a “most anticipated” book

Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 5.23.42 PMIt’s not just Updike scholars who seem excited to see what Adam Begley has to say in his unauthorized biography Updike, which is due in bookstores on April 8. The book was also included by a contributing editor of The Millions in a feature on “Most Anticipated: The Great 2014 Book Preview.” 

“What’s left to say about John Updike that Updike didn’t already say exhaustively, and say better than anyone else could have?” Garth Risk Hallberg asks, sounding eerily like Updike himself.

“Yet Adam Begley has apparently found enough fresh material, or a fresh enough angle on the well-trod, to fill 576 pages. For a primer on Updike, there’s no way this book can surpass Nicholson Baker’s U & I, but it’s always a good sign when a literary biographer is a novelist himself.”

Begley’s Updike biography is also one of the books singled out in USA Today‘s “Winter Books preview: From Nancy Horan to Robin Roberts.”

 

Vermont Public Radio’s Bill Mares reacts to Just Looking

Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 4.36.48 PMToday, Vermont Public Radio’s Bill Mares posted “Mares: Just Looking,” in which he tells about reading Updike’s book, Just Looking, over the holidays and responds in his own thoughtful way—more reaction than review, really, but interesting nonetheless.

There’s also a “listen” button to click on if your eyes are tired of reading things on the computer, and you’ll hear Mares read the on-air version.

“My favorite essay in the book is called ‘Writers and Artists,'” he says, offering Updike’s own description as proof: “He describes his own excitement, at the ‘glistening quick precision, the possibility of smudging, the tremor and swoop that impart life to the lines'” of the drawings he attempted as a child.

“My only quibble is that Updike doesn’t include any reference to Chinese calligraphy, arguably one of the greatest intellectual endeavors which combines artistic expression and verbal meaning,” Mares says.

 

Milwaukee blogger adds another Updike story commentary

recreadingMilwaukee Journal Sentinel blogger Jim Higgins writes, “I’m reading and commenting on a story from the Library of America’s recently published John Updike: The Collected Stories each Wednesday until I finish the collection or give up.”

On January 1, 2014, he posted “Reading the John Updike stories: ‘Intercession,'” but if you scroll down you’ll find links to other Updike story commentaries. On January 8 he promises “a discussion of Updike’s story ‘The Alligators” and gives two stars to a story that “would go in my hypothetical Best of John Updike collection.” So far “His Finest Hour” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” have made the grade, but not the frequently anthologized “Snowing in Greenwich Village” or “Friends from Philadelphia.”

Boston area adult extension course on Updike stories announced

Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 11.56.07 AMJudith Wynn, who reviewed several of Updike’s books for The Boston Herald, will teach a six-week course, “The Short Fiction of John Updike,” at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Harvard Square.

The classes will run from 6-7:30 p.m. on Mondays, beginning January 13. The main texts will be John Updike: The Early Stories, 1953-1975, selections from the later stories, and Self-Consciousness.

For further information or to enroll, go to CCAE.org or phone (617) 547-6789.