The New England Historical Society recently posted an item about Ipswich’s “former, famous novelist resident” and the stir that Couples caused after it was published.

“Updike, who was himself a former columnist to the local newspaper, tried his hand at damage control, sending a letter to the newspaper flatly denying that Tarbox was Ipswich. But no one was buying it. . . .

“In the end, Updike found it convenient to head off on a European trip and move out of Ipswich altogether to the tonier environs of Beverly Farms. But he would continue to visit Ipswich throughout his life, lunching at one of the downtown clubs and avoiding the scowls from some residents that would follow him until he died.”

Here’s the full article, “John Updike in Couples Titillated America, Infuriated his Neighbors”

Financial Review (Australia) published a letter to the editor on July 18 in response to a July 11 review of Adam Begley’s Updike:

John Updike in good company

John Updike joins a long line of celebrated authors who have written novels thinly based on their personal relationships with others (“A life well read”, Review, July 11).

The much-travelled Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene developed fictional characters partly drawn from their accommodating hosts and thus easily recognisable in small towns in remote and exotic locations. However, it would be hard to beat one of the lurid plotlines in Edmund Schiddell’s The Devil in Bucks County. The embarrassed people of Doylestown have never forgiven Schiddell for that public indiscretion. Updike also scandalised his native Pennsylvania.

There must be something weird in the water in that state.

Mike Fogarty
Weston, ACT

Robert M. Detman, who maintains a blog on The Literary, recently explored what could only be termed his ambivalence toward John Updike and his writing in a post titled “The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction.”

“In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life,” he writes. “I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

“What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience—admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.”

Of course, Updike isn’t the first major author to write highly autobiographical fiction. Ernest Hemingway quickly comes to mind, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Independent asked 100 “leading figures of British literature to name the characters who give them the most reading pleasure.”

Author and critic John Sutherland (A Little History of Literature) picked Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom, the serial hero of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, is the only protagonist I’ve grown old with—doomed, but indomitable and lovable,” he writes.

If you’re wondering what other American literary fictional characters made the list, Rhett Butler (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind) was chosen, as was Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed hero Dick Diver (Tender Is the Night), Humbert Humbert (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita), Patrick Bateman (Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho), and Herman Melville’s white whale (Moby-Dick).

Two of Philip Roth’s characters (Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath) made the list, but Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 scored the most, with literary figures choosing three characters from that comic war novel: Yossarian, Dunbar, and Milo.

“Best fictional characters from Sherlock Holmes to Jane Eyre as chosen by 100 literary figures”