Member John McTavish is eliciting responses from John Updike readers regarding such questions as how they discovered JU, their favorite JU book (and why), which book (and why) they would recommend to new readers, and a memorable line (or lines, or paragraph) from JU.

“I hope to collate the results of the survey and publish them,” McTavish says, “but publish or not, I will email a copy of the accumulated results to all the participants.”

McTavish says he’s already received some “sparkling replies” from a number of people, including Don Greiner, Jack De Bellis, and Biljana Dojcinovic. Send your responses to him at: jmctav@vianet.ca

Below is a sample response, from Bruce McLeod, a minister and former Moderator of the United Church of Canada:

     In  the shrinkage of bookshelves  occasioned by our move to a condo years ago, I lost some old friends, but hung on to some special ones like Pigeon Feathers and Roger’s Version. Picking up the latter today, I notice many margin marks and underlinings, especially in the early part of the book (for some reason they seemed less frequent further on).

     I think I was attracted by the interrupting student way back in 1986: only later did I begin to appreciate the deeper insights of Pascal and others, that the world provides “enough light for those who desire to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” And, of course Updike’s passing comments—like “The pious often, I have noticed, have a definiteness that in others they would judge rude”—were always worth a margin stroke.

     Along the way, I loved his playing with words and images like Glenn Gould plays with notes and keys. I loved his “noticing,” or “paying attention” where we look away quickly. I long ago marked a favorite paragraph in Rogers’s Version—his memorable description of the pipe-smoker (having once been one myself!):

     “The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting; those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again.  And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke.  Oddly I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.”

     Who else would notice that,  describe it so exactly, or deepen it to a comment on despair!

     The short stories, I think, caught my attention first. You mention a young woman being skewered by reading Couples. I too have bumped into Updike scenes when, as you say, “the truth hurts.” Like when the man about to separate from his wife, goes in to explain to his children but, in their presence, can’t remember the reasons!

     The poems always grab, and sometimes stick like burrs. They’re not sweet; always (or often) a dark edge. I love “Baseball”—”..invented in America, where beneath/ the good cheer and sly jazz the chance/ of failure is everybody’s right,/ beginning with baseball.” Also “The Rockettes” for sheer precision of word choice. And, of course, “Religious Consolation”….Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs/ those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints/ whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,/ those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books/ Moroni etched in tedious detail?/ We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.”