The recent issue of IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies) features a collaborative critical essay on “Thirty-Six-Point Perpetua: John Updike’s Personal Essays in the Later Years,” by Laurence W. Mazzeno (Alvernia University) and Sue Norton (Dublin Institute of Technology).

The authors note that “determined as John Updike was to write himself into immortality to the greatest extent possible, he was noticeably less determined, especially in his later years, to render himself his own subject matter. He explains his reticence in Self-Consciousness (1989): ‘The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibilities in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame.'”

“When he does yield, overtly, to the personal essay form,” the authors conclude, “his writing tends to have a texture more revelatory than divulging. He will tell us how he feels about his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood, his more recent past and his present, but he is not drawn to gross self-exposure. He does not veer toward the taboo or to the explication of intense inner pain, as so-called confessional writers often do. Nor does he appear to be seeking empathy or absolution. Instead, he gazes calmly upon his own life and articulates what he sees in terms as neutral and exacting as words will allow. . . . Instead, what Updike as essayist seems most preoccupied with is a kind of public self-construction, an identity of record.”

Here’s the full article.