Rabbit at Rest, Updike remembered

Today John Updike (1932-2009) would have celebrated his 85th birthday, and notable among the remembrances published in commemoration is one by Steve King, written, fittingly, for a books site:  Barnes & Noble.

In “Something Intricate and Fierce,” King begins with a quote from Updike and follows with this quote from reviewer Jonathan Raban:  “Rabbit at Rest is one of the very few modern novels in English . . . that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.”

Birthday tributes are a testament to Updike’s cultural importance, but King’s post illustrates something that would make Updike smile if he were still around to blow out the candles:  that he has political relevance, something that in his lifetime, ironically, critics never appreciated.

“Whatever Updike’s own politics—biographer Begley notes that Updike on his deathbed rejoiced at President Obama’s inauguration—some commentators say that Updike lives on as spokesman for embattled Middle Americans, whose current angst and anger he saw coming.” And King concludes with a quote from Charles McElwee, written for The American Conservative magazine:  “‘Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism—in the form of Donald Trump—prevailed on Election Day 2016.”

Updike—and irony—are still very much alive.

Happy 85th, Mr. Updike!

Miranda Updike featured in upcoming group show

Miranda Updike‘s new work can be seen the in group show “Territory,” which opens March 1 and runs through March 31, 2017 at the Paula Estey Gallery, 3 Harris St., Newburyport, Mass. The opening “PEG party” is scheduled for March 10 from 6-8 p.m. Miranda, the youngest daughter of John Updike, is on the board of The John Updike Childhood Home.

 

Review: Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction

Updike criticism over the past several decades has gravitated toward the Rabbit tetralogy. In Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017, cloth, 228pp.), Michial Farmer bucks that trend, leaving Rabbit out of his discussion entirely. Given Updike’s exhaustive (and exhausting) oeuvre, it’s no surprise that, despite the broad title, only a handful of novels make the cut for Farmer’s exploration of Updike and the imagination.

As the back cover note summarizes, Farmer “argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a necessary component of human flourishing, it also has a destructive, darker side, in which it shades into something like philosophical idealism. Here the mind constructs the world around it and then, unhelpfully, imposes this created world between itself and the ‘real world.’ In other words, Updike is not himself an idealist but sees idealism as a persistent temptation for the artistic imagination.”

In a first chapter, “John Updike and the Existentialist Imagination,” Farmer posits that while Updike “cannot endorse Sartre’s atheism or the nihilism that lurks just beyond his celebration of humanity’s radical freedom,” he nonetheless “uses Sartrean metaphysics as a jumping-off point for his own, more Kierkegaardian, reflections.” The fullest discussion of the latter remains David Crowe’s recent study, but for the intended purpose of this volume Farmer does a nice job of setting the stage for a study of the imaginative nature of Updike’s work, weighing Sartre’s suggestion that the human imagination, “and in particular the aesthetic imagination—can be a way to fight against meaninglessness.”

According to Farmer, Updike’s “job as a fiction writer” is to “use his powerful imagination, and the language that makes up its currency, to falsify the material world” that exists in opposition to the self and “bestow on it an order that does not properly speaking belong to it, but in bestowing that order to preserve and re-present it. The imagination thus counts among the highest and most important human faculties,” Farmer writes.

In the 15 chapters that follow, Farmer treats Updike’s works loosely chronologically but also finds a way to order them topically with the aid of a five-part section structure:

  1. The “Mythic Immensity” of the Parental Imagination
  2. Collective Hallucination in the Adulterous Society
  3. Imaginative Lust in the Scarlet Letter Trilogy
  4. Female Power and the Female Imagination
  5. The Remembering Imagination

Regarding what he calls the “parental imagination,” Farmer argues, “Mothers, in Updike’s early fiction, tend to create imaginative worlds for their sons to live in, and these worlds, when confronted with the world of mere things, tend to crush the sons for whom they were created.” That’s a big claim, and the chapters supporting it are probably the most enticing to consider, yet also the most elusive—especially when Farmer at times seems to conflate “force of will” with “force of imagination.” Still, his analyses of “Flight,” “His Mother Inside Him,” “Ace in the Hole,” “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “The Cats,” The Centaur, and Of the Farm are engaging.

The chapters themselves read like brief imaginative essays: a combination of scholarship and readability that’s well reasoned and written in such a way as to anticipate reader questions. As a result, the author, while discussing texts that would be familiar to most Updike scholars and aficionados, confidently proceeds without feeling the need to cite a tremendous amount of secondary sources—only those that seem necessary to him. Some scholars may see that as a negative. Nowhere near all of the secondary sources for Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, for example, are cited. Yet, underlying his arguments, Farmer demonstrates an awareness of the range of Updike scholarship throughout his chapter discussions, quoting from both the very first monograph (the Hamiltons) and the most recent one (Crowe).

Some of Farmer’s arguments have an “of course” feel to them, perhaps because the chapters’ arguments are compressed and proceed so methodically—with just enough theoretical grounding, contextual references, and examples from Updike’s works to lead readers to what feels like a foregone conclusion. Sometimes it’s a slightly new twist on familiar theory. For example, Updike’s oft-stated intent “’to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery,’ is,” Farmer writes, “in part a method of keeping the human imagination honest: we may not be able to have perfect access to the material world, but the material world periodically, perhaps even constantly, makes itself known by tearing down the imagination constructions we build on its back. The author’s fidelity to the world is thus held in dialectical tension with his imaginative project; the two are always in dialogue, and the human self is always moving between the two of them—forever building, forever destroying.” Mostly, it’s the attention paid to works that are too often ignored by other scholars that’s refreshing.

In the “adulterous society” section Farmer discusses “Man and Daughter in the Cold,” “Giving Blood,” “The Taste of Metal,” “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” “The Hillies,” Marry Me, and Couples; in addition to The Witches of Eastwick, for the section on female power he considers “Marching through Boston,” “The Stare,” “Report of Health,” “Living with a Wife,” and “Slippage”; and in the final section he draws on examples from Memories of the Ford Administration, “In Football Season,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” “Leaving Church Early,” and “The Egg Race,” in addition to the more frequently discussed “The Dogwood Tree,” “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” and “On Being a Self Forever.”

One of this book’s strengths is that does manage to reconsider old concepts in the pursuit of new, and to explore a satisfying range of critical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments without insulting the intelligence of those readers who might already know the terms and their meanings. That kind of writing is hard to pull off, yet the author manages to do so with grace. As a result, Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction is an easy read—one of the more engaging and accessible monographs on an author that I’ve encountered in recent years. It holds appeal not only for Updike scholars, but also for readers with more than a casual interest in Updike. This book helps readers to appreciate the sometimes erratic or unexplainable behavior of many of Updike’s characters, who live in worlds partially created by their own vivid and often conflicted imaginations.

Reviewed by James Plath

Updike Society program set for ALA

The John Updike Society will sponsor one roundtable discussion and one panel of papers at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, Mass., on May 25-26, 2017:

Did Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Anticipate or Parallel the Rise of Trump Voters?
9:00-10:20 a.m., Thursday, May 25

  • Moderator: James Plath, Illinois Wesleyan University
  • Jerome Loving, Texas A&M University
  • Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College
  • Scott Dill, Case Western Reserve University
  • Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
  • Richard G. Androne, Albright College

John Updike: Comparatively Speaking
2:20-3:30 p.m., Friday, May 26

  • Chair: Sylvie Mathé, Aix-Marseille University
  • “The Work of Mind: John Updike’s Fiction and Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Biljana Dojčinović, University of Belgrade
  • “’That a marriage ends is less than ideal’: Revisiting Updike’s Maples Stories,” James Schiff, University of Cincinnati
  • “The ‘Personal’ in John Updike’s Pennsylvania and His ‘Dialogues’ with Kenzaburo Oe: The ‘I-Novel’ Tradition of Japan and the Writers’ Reading in the Societies Divided,” Takashi Nakatani, Yokohama City University

A business meeting of the Society is scheduled for Thursday, May 25, from 10:30-11:50 a.m. All are welcome to attend, but must register for the conference. Here’s the entire program.

Witches of Eastwick film retro-reviewed

You know a film still has currency when it sparks the headline, “The Devil is a F**kboy: Revisiting ‘The Witches of Eastwick,'” with the subhead “Thirty years later, George Miller’s diabolical feminist parable feels relevant as hell. Gird your cherries.”

Meg shields writes, “Miller is a man of many talents: he wrote Babe; directed its weird and wonderful sequel; helmed the academy award winning Happy Feet franchise; and even served as producer and second unit director on the Sam Neil-starring sailboat thriller Dead Calm. In 1983, in between Mad Max sequels, Miller directed a segment for the Twilight Zone movie, which saw a bug-eyed John Lithgow feverishly trying to shoot a gremlin off the wing of a commercial airliner. Enamoured by his experience with Amblin Entertainment, and with an adapted screenplay of a recent work by American literary treasure John Updike in his possession, Miller made the (admittedly rocky) move to Hollywood. And so, we were blessed with The Witches of Eastwick.”

“Darryl is, categorically, a shit lord: oozing with faux feminist sympathy as greasy and insincere as his joke of a ponytail. He’s the kind of guy who takes gender studies courses just to hit on women; a sneezy alt-bro who uses disingenuous ‘wokeness’ as a buff for disarming sexual conquests.”

“Eastwick’s is a hazy, effortless magic,” she concludes, “whose exposition takes a backseat to the joyous interplay and collective power of female friendship. To ask for extrapolation is to fundamentally misunderstand Miller’s focus: a very real examination of toxic masculinity and sexual power dynamics, couched, deliciously, within occult ambiguity.

The Poorhouse Fair reviewed in retrospect

Fifty-seven years after Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published, it’s still attracting attention. Ray Greenblatt reviewed it last summer for the blog North of Oxford.

“Since John Updike’s oeuvres have come to an end, it is fitting to revisit his very first novel,” he writes.

“John Updike’s short novel of one hundred and fifty pages is equally divided into three chapters. Each chapter contains a dozen sections or more offering glimpses of the people and events at the poorhouse fair as it moves through the day. This kaleidoscopic effect is often intensified by certain fascinating techniques,” he writes.

“Some of Updike’s sentences are bedrock declarations, such as what products sold best at the fair . . . . Or unique personification . . . . Or pure fanciful imagery . . . .

“Late in the novel to underscore the pouring out of the long day and the jagged energy of those tending and attending the fair, Updike uses a stream-of-conscious[ness] method. . . ,” he adds, offering examples from the text.

“Reputations fluctuate. Hemingway, dead now a half-century, in the future might be known for:  a book on bull-fighting or big game hunting; a few stories still unique ninety years later; or A Moveable Feast, nearly an afterthought to him. John Updike has been a factory of endeavor:  two Eastwicks, three Bechs, four Rabbits just in the genre of novel. Will the multiple weights of these works dominate? Time will winnow literature, that and changing culture. Sometimes first is best; I firmly believe that The Poorhouse Fair will endure.”

Read the entire review.

Book on famous stutterers includes chapter on Updike

In Chapter 12 of Famous Stutterers, author Gerald R. McDermott begins,

“Until John Updike (1932-2009), no one had ever described stuttering with such dead-on precision. Once he compared it to a traffic jam. ‘I have lots of words inside me: but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.’

“He painted a picture of facial tics that will make any relative of a stutterer groan with recognition.
Viewing myself on taped television, I see the repulsive symptoms
of an approaching stammer take possession of my face—an
electronically rapid flutter of the eyelids, a distortion of the mouth
as of a leather purse being cinched, a terrifying hardening of the
upper lip, a fatal tensing and a lifting of the voice

“All stutterers will nod knowingly when they hear him refer to that ‘untrustworthy’ part of himself that ‘can collapse at awkward or anxious moments into a stutter.’ They might smile at his philosophical conclusion that stuttering is a sign of the ‘duality of our existence, the ability of the body and soul to say no to one another.’ Or his reflection that a stammer is the acknowledgement of unacknowledged complexities surrounding even the simplest of verbal exchanges.”

Other famous stutterers included in the book are Moses, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Joshua Chamberlain, King George VI, Winston Churchill, Byron Pitts, Marilyn Monroe, John Stossel, and Annie Glenn.

Amazon link

Artist includes Updike book in lauded painting

In a Reading Eagle article titled “Amity Township artist paints a picture of Berks,” Ron Devlin muses that any list of things that define Berks County, Pa. would have to include “Pennsylvania Dutch delicacies like scrapple, ring bologna, shoofly pie and dippy eggs.”

But the list would also have to include “Luden’s Cough Drops, a 5th Avenue candy bar and Godiva chocolate” along with “Tom Sturgis Pretzels,” he writes.

“John Updike, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Rabbit, Run, and ’80s street artist Keith Haring—both grew up in Berks—are musts on the artistic list,” along with singer Taylor Swift, he says.

Have a look at what Amity Township artist Steve Scheuring thought defined Berks County enough to include in the 3×6′ painting he did as an homage.

“A stickler for detail,” Devlin writes, Scheuring bought every item in the collage and arranged them meticulously “in intricate patterns that tell a story.” He admits “the copy of Updike’s Rabbit, Run near the center of the painting is not an original first edition. It’s a library copy he bought online for $40, a fraction of what an original sells for.”

Scheuring’s Berk’s County “has been named one of the 10 finalists in International Artist Magazine’s Art Challenge 2017. A photo and an article appear in the magazine’s February issue.

Scheuring is a largely self-taught artist who has exhibited at Penn State Berks’ Freyberger Gallery, the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, and the Allentown Art Museum. The above photo is by Susan Keen of the Reading Eagle. Below is a photo of Scheuring by photographer Ben Hasty from the Eagle article “Steve Scheuring raises ordinary life to the level of art.”

Rabbit, Run in the running for Britain’s favorite 2nd novel

The Royal Society of Literature is polling people to discover Britain’s favorite second novel, and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is in contention.

“In selecting the books for the voting list, we have used the following criteria:

  • Each book is the second full novel published by its author (not necessailry the second novel the author has written). Novellas, collections of short stories and any non-fiction works are not counted.
  • The writers may be living or dead and may come from any nation.
  • The books may have been written in any language, but must be available in English. The second novel judgement is based on order of original publication, not order of publication in translation.
  • Novels written by members of the RSL Council, or by the RSL’s Presidents and Vice-Presidents, have been excluded, as have all the novels entered for the 2017 Encore Award.
  • We hope that the voting list overall includes a varied and fascinating range of novels. We realise that lots of great novelists are missing from the list – usually because we felt that their second novel is not well-known or accomplished enough to attract many votes. We apologise in advance for any glaring omissions – and look forward to hearing your views.”

Here’s the link to the story and the Society’s Facebook page, where discussions are taking place.

The tough competition includes:

Pride and Prejudice
Fahrenheit 451
The Plague
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
The Awakening
Oliver Twist
The Mill on the Floss
The Scarlet Letter
Their Eyes Were Watching God
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Shipping News
The Crying of Lot 49
The Fountainhead
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Ben-Hur
The House of Mirth

and, ironically, Infinite Jest . . . by Updike hater David Foster Wallace.