John Updike, Ipswich, Massachusetts’ most famous resident, began living there in 1957 and continued to reside in the North Shore area not far from Boston until the end of his life. On May 7, 2014, Radio Boston offered a story on “Reexamining John Updike’s Years in Ipswich.”
On May 7, 2014 The Pantagraph (Bloomington-Normal, Ill.) did a story on Updike Society president Jim Plath’s involvement with the ongoing restoration of The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.
For the curious:
“IWU professor helps save John Updike home.”
The last time the newspaper published an item about the house it led to the donation of a handsome set of Updike first editions that will be on display at the house, once construction is completed. Who knows? Maybe this one will lead to more donations.
In a story that appeared today, Updike biographer Adam Begley shared his picks for “Top 10 John Updike short stories” with The Guardian. Click on the link for details, but we won’t keep you in suspense for his picks:
“The Happiest I’ve Been” (1958)
“Separating” (1974)
“A&P” (1960)
“A Sandstone Farmhouse” (1990)
“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island” (1960)
“The Bulgarian Poetess” (1964)
“Bech in Czech” (1986)
“Problems” (1975)
“Here Come the Maples” (1976)
“My Father’s Tears” (2005)
Whether by choice or by happy accident, it’s worth noting that Begley’s list contains a story from every decade Updike worked as a professional writer.
Veooz.com recently posted “John Updike: Trending Photos and Videos” that have been “tweeted” recently on Twitter. Have a look. What’s online may surprise you.
On May 5, 2014, Salon published an interview that David Daley conducted with Updike biographer Adam Begley,
In it, Begley talks about the hazards of writing a biography and shares his thoughts on some of Updike’s friends and harshest critics, among them:
“[Christopher Lasch and Updike], I think, egged each other on, and pushed each other to greater academic feats. It’s weird enough that they were roommates, what’s even weirder is that they then both graduate summa, that Kit Lasch gets the prize for best thesis, and Updike gets the No. 2 prize. I mean, I don’t suppose that’s ever happened before in the history of Harvard, freshman year roommates getting No. 1 and No. 2 essay prizes, and graduate summa. It’s an extraordinary coincidence.”
“Jonathan [Franzen] has very harsh words for Updike. And I remain convinced—and I admire Jonathan’s work and I’m fond of Jonathan personally—but I believe that he’s suffering from a bit of anxiety of influence here. That he feels the need to denigrate Updike because his project is really not very different from Updike.”
“Let’s go back to 1996, ’97. David Foster Wallace is the flavor of the month. He’s just published ‘Infinite Jest.’ John Updike has just published a novel set a couple years in the future, which is somewhat eerily like the future world of ‘Infinite Jest.’ . . . So yes, I got David Foster Wallace [to review the novel], but no, I was not involved in the attempt to assassinate Updike . . . . David Foster Wallace was not a full-blooded critic of Updike. He had in his collection a heavily annotated copy of ‘Rabbit, Run.’ He is an Updike fan. But ‘Toward the End of Time’ is not a good novel.”
More literary musings from Paul Elie of Georgetown University. In his April 30, 2014 Everything That Rises blogpost he springboards again off of “Louis Menand’s characterization of John Updike as a novelist who understood his way of writing as ‘transubstantiating'” and explores a connection between Updike and poet John Donne, speculating on others. Here’s the link:
This month Rowman & Littlefield published a book by William Patrick Martin titled A Lifetime of Fiction: The 500 Most Recommended Reads for Ages 2 to 102, and Updike’s Rabbit series is Number 1 of 100 books listed in the Adults (Ages 18+) section. In recommending Updike to readers, Martin offers more of a description than a reason for reading:
“Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest. These novels follow the life of one-time high-school basketball star Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom over several decades, from young adulthood, through paunchy middle age, to his retirement and death. In 2001, Updike wrote a novella sequel, Rabbit Remembered, which continues with some of the main characters.”
Here’s the Amazon.com link to the book.
In case you’re curious, the Number 1 book for Preschoolers (Ages 2-5) is The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle; Number 1 for Early Readers (Ages 4-8) is Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans; for Middle Readers (Ages 9-12) it’s the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling; and for Young Adults (Ages 13-17) it’s The Giver, by Lois Lowry.
The dust jacket flap copy tells us that the book represents “a composite of the most noteworthy book award lists, best book publications, and recommended reading lists from leading libraries, schools, and parenting organizations across the country.” Martin, who wrote his dissertation on “the epic University of Chicago ‘great books debate’ of the 1930s and 1940s, has been a professor of education at Temple University and Monmouth University.
Georgetown University blogger Paul Elie is at it again, riffing off of a Louis Menand review of the new Begley biography of Updike in a short think piece titled “John Updike, Transubstantiator.”
In an April 25, 2014 entry on Everything That Rises, Elie begins with Menand’s characterization of Updike as “a priest of literature who performed rites of transubstantiation akin to those of Joyce and Proust” and acknowledges that there’s “plenty of testimony” to be found to support such a view. But he also suggests that one shouldn’t make too much of this “congenial” argument—”not to make it the skeleton key that will unlock his large and various body of work.
“Yes, Updike hung photographs of Joyce and Proust on his office wall. But he also revered Nabokov, whose sense of transcendence is strictly, fiercely artistic; he had American realists like Sinclair Lewis in the front of his mind; and unlike the modernist priests of art he cherished his readers, many of them people who saw no reason that American life should need transubstantiating—people who recognized postwar America as a kind of earthly paradise.”
Today, April 24, 2014, Newsday published an excerpt from Adam Begley’s biography of Updike which deals with Updike’s stint as Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker magazine. Here’s the link:
Kirkus Reviews on April 9, 2014 published an interview with Adam Begley, who dished, “I spoke to people he’d had affairs with. He had a lot of friends, and there was a great deal of interconnecting there. If you’ve read Couples, you know exactly what I mean,” Begley said.
“The first time he wrote about adultery was a book called Marry Me that was published 10 years after he wrote it, and it’s the only book in his cannon that was published out of sequence,” Begley said. “That was a book about an affair that he had had in the mid-’60s and it wasn’t published until the ’70s. It’s a novel, but it’s very closely based on the facts of an affair.”
The interview was conducted by Scott Porch. Here’s the link.