Janet Cormier of Oddball Magazine was inspired to write a prose poem about a writer and fan because of “a radio interview about John Updike by one of his biographers and a first time caller fan.”
Here’s the link to “Bamboozled No More! Writer and Fan”
Writing for PBS, Victoria Fleischer on September 11 posted an article titled, “Have you read the 200 ‘best American novels’?”
She reported that a single individual “embarked on an experiment” and “committed to reading only American novels and decided to compile a list of the 100 best that were published between 1770 and 1985.”
The architect of this plan was, well, an architect from Massachusetts named David Handlin.
Not surprisingly, Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. But it does raise an eyebrow that it’s the ONLY Updike book included. The Pulitzer Prize winner Rabbit Is Rich didn’t make his list, nor did Updike’s own favorite book, the National Book Award-winning The Centaur.
Handlin’s picks have caused a stir, with Sandra Gilbert, a distinguished professor of English emerita at the University of California, questioning the criteria for “novel” and “American.” She wrote her own list in response, and one of the things she did was to remove Updike—though she was quoted in the PBS article as saying “I’m not at all inclined to demand deletions, but prefer instead to suggest additions that would make this mini-narrative of our literature (for a narrative it is) more representative of the culture we’ve inherited.”
John Updike Society member Kangqin Li’s doctoral thesis “Vision and form in John Updike’s short fiction” was filed on September 1, 2014 and is now available online through the University of Leicester Research Archive.
Abstract:
This thesis studies the visual aesthetics of the twentieth-century American writer John Updike’s short fiction. Exploring the related issues of form and vision, temporality and visuality, the thesis seeks to combine two analyses: a study of visuality in the short fiction of Updike, and a re-consideration of the short story as a genre. I shall argue that the two levels of analysis are interrelated, for it is at the point of the epistemological uncertainty in the act of ‘seeing’ that Updike offers something unusual to the short story form; it is also around this stubborn issue of the relationship between vision and knowledge that contemporary short story criticism seems to fall short. The thesis unfolds first with a negotiation for an understanding of the short story’s special narrative space and then with a formalist analysis of Updike’s short fiction and its respective involvement with three visual media: painting, photography and cinema. Exploring the complex interrelationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ through the lens of Updike’s visually rich texts, the thesis aims to come to a better knowledge of vision and form in the short story.
In “Controlled Rapture” (September 15, 2014), which is not available through open-access online yet, William Deresiewicz reviews Begley’s Updike for The New Republic. Though he has some very nice things to say about Updike, he begins, curiously, with the (some might think flawed) assumption that Updike’s literary star is currently dim, tarnished, or falling. Ignoring the large volume of major newspapers and critics who continue to assess Updike as one of the great writers of his century, Deresiewicz instead trots out Harold Bloom’s “oft-quoted remark that Updike was ‘a minor novelist with a major style'”—a great sound-byte in an era that feeds off of them—and David Foster Wallace’s decades-old indictment of Updike and the white male literary establishment in an essay many dismissed as the howl of a young buck trying to take on the alpha male(s) during rutting season.
“Only time will tell if Begley’s book becomes a final send-off or the start of its subject’s rehabilitation,” Deresiewicz continues. “Neither, I suspect. Updike’s prospects, in the near term, do not look any brighter than they did around the time that Wallace dropped his bomb in 1997 (or than those of Mailer and Roth, the other ‘phallocrats’ he named in his indictment). Our cultural politics are still pretty much where they were at the time: shackled to our identity politics. But Updike strikes me as the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered. The time will come—in thirty or fifty or a hundred years—when the values of our own effulgent age will seem as odious as those of the 1950s (or for that matter, of the 1850s) do to us today. No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote. They will turn to him—readers will, and writers, I think, especially will—for what is permanently valid in his work: the virtuosity of his technique, his ability to craft a sentence, a scene, a story, to calibrate tones and modulate effects; the penetration of his eye, his gift for seeing things and seeing into minds; his brave, honest, unembarrassed frankness; and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose.”
The word count for this review—close to six thousand words—justifies not only the writer’s predictions for Updike’s literary legacy, but also underscores the fact that, at least according to The New Republic, he’s a major figure now.
Perhaps the most telling sentence in Deresiewicz’s review is “No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote.” Those who would deny Updike his seat in the American literary pantheon are still bothered by his hawkish stance during the Vietnam years, and still annoyed that a man who steadfastly and consistently voted Democratic wouldn’t be more political in his fiction. But while Bellow and Roth were writing about professors and a segment of society that many would consider more elite, Updike gave us that quintessential fictional representation of the American middle class: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. That in itself is as political a statement as the artists who first departed from unwritten academy rules and painted everyday scenes with the scale and scope normally reserved for great battles and historical events. And it’s no coincidence that Updike’s painterly hero was Vermeer.
Reputations ebb and flow, and those fortunate enough to become part of the canon in their literary afterlives must be complex enough, important enough, and representative enough to withstand future attempts to oust them. Updike’s fiction, as Deresiewicz suggests, has the potential to last because when all is said and written about, Updike was and will always remain for readers a very talented writer who had plenty to say about science, religion, relationships, and trying to live life as a middle-class American in a century that was moving technologically forward at such a rapid pace that life itself could become a challenge.
“Does the Rabbit cycle finally cohere?” Deresiewicz asks, rhetorically. “Does it amount to the ‘epic’ that its author dreamed of writing, Begley tells us, in his youth? Maybe not,” he concludes, though there are many who would disagree. “Maybe, like Rabbit, it loses momentum and shape. Maybe Updike never did write that one big book, that single indelible masterpiece. Maybe his corpus is less than the sum of its parts. But what parts.”
Boston Globe writer Alex Beam today posted an article-column titled “John Updike’s trash is everyone’s treasure,” in which he recounted the story of The Other John Updike activist-archivist Paul Moran’s habit of hauling off bags of trash from Updike’s curb and rescuing all manner of ephemera.
“Moran rescued a lot more than ephemera,” Beam adds. “He has posted at least one explicit letter from a lover, and now owns an Updike address book, a trove of floppy disks (Wang!), and notes for a contemplated novel about Saint Paul, which may someday see the light of day.”
Beam, who says he disagrees with Moran’s assertion that Updike’s “tossed-out family and travel snapshots are copyright-protected”—actually, intellectual property law seems to be pretty clear that the person who took the photo is the author/artist and that his/her property is protected—appropriately closes with a line from Updike’s poem “My Children at the Dump” and says, “Thank you, Paul Moran . . . . To quote Updike, you are ‘giving the mundane its beautiful due.'”
Ian McEwan is on a book tour promoting his new novel, The Children Act, but consciously or subconsciously he’s been promoting John Updike as well. In a previous interview (JUS post) he mentioned Updike favorably, and in this interview-article he’s quoted as saying,
“Updike at his best is . . . a great observer. He never ceases to surprise and delight me. I love the intelligence of the sentences with that odd little hard-to-define spring . . . an extra beat that quickens my pulse. Who else does that? Shakespeare, Milton, and many, many other poets. Bellow does. Calvino. There’s no end of them, really. But never so copiously as Updike. One can open him at random and find some felicity on the page.”
Here’s the full article: “Science and Religion Clash in Ian McEwan’s New Novel”
The latest publication to include Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, on their Best of 2014 lists is The DC Spotlight Newspaper, which numbers it among their “Books To Know – Top 10 List – September 2014.”
4. Updike
By Adam Begley, April 2014
Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.
The featured poem for August 31, 2014 on The Writer’s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor, was Updike’s poem “August,” from A Child’s Calendar. Here’s the link.
Novelist Ian McEwan was recently interviewed for the Books/Culture section of The Observer in a piece published on Saturday, August 30, 2014: “Ian McEwan: ‘I’m only 66—my notebook is still full of ideas.'”
Although interviewer Robert McCrum mostly asks about McEwan’s latest book, The Children Act, he also describes a moment in the interview in which McEwan evoked John Updike:
“Out of the blue he remembers interviewing the late John Updike in his final years. ‘We talked about all this,’ he recalls. ‘He told me: The older you get the less frightening death becomes.’ He frowns in puzzlement. ‘I’m not sure whether to believe him.’
“So does he believe him?
“‘No.’ A beat. ‘Do you believe those obituaries that say, ‘Died peacefully in his sleep?’ (McEwan was at Christopher Hitchens’s bedside shortly before he died.) ‘Still, wouldn’t be a bad way to go.'”
WAMC/Northeast Public Radio—a regional network serving parts of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—released its “Programming Notes: September 2014” and the month’s offerings include Labor Day readings from Updike.
“At 11AM, we’ll bring you two of the short stories from American writer John Updike. In this Selected Shorts special, hosted by television actress and comedian extraordinaire Jane Kaczmarek, Kaczmarek will read Updike’s “Unstuck,” and screen legend Sally Field will perform “Playing with Dynamite.”