Category Archives: Books

Happy Magazine includes Updike on its list of best erotic novels

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Some of the titles on this list by Ria Pandey are actually short story collections, but no matter: here are 34 of the most titillating erotic works of fiction, according to the author. Updike’s Couples made the cut, but many Updike fans might be thinking Rabbit Is Rich worthy of the list as well.

Some of Updike’s plain-brown-wrapper company:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D.H. Lawrence
The Tropic of Cancer—Henry Miller
Story of O—Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage
Emmanuelle—Emmanuelle Arsan
Portnoy’s Complaint—Philip Roth
Delta of Venus—Anaïs Nin
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty—Anne Rice
Lust and Other Stories—Susan Minot
Vox—Nicholson Baker
The Thorn Birds—Colleen McCullough
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.—Catherine Millet

Of Couples, Pandey writes, “Couples details the lives of ten married couples living in a New England community who create a sex cult. While it sounds simple on the surface level, Couples embarks on an intense emotional and psychological meditation on the nature of love, sex, and commitment. A review by Time describes the events of the novel as such: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”

Fellow psoriasis sufferer cites Updike’s bravery

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In a review for The Guardian [U.K.], “Skin by Sergio del Molino review—a meditation on psoriasis and the psyche; A sufferer writes about how the skin condition affected figures as diverse as Joseph Stalin, John Updike and Cyndi Lauper,” Houman Barekat notes that del Molino was 21 when he first experienced psoriasis symptoms.

Barekat summarizes the affliction: “a chronic autoimmune condition that causes an overproduction of epidermal cells, resulting in scaling on the surface of the skin” that “appear in red blotches that sometimes crack and bleed.” Barekat identifies the accompanying related symptoms—arthritis, back pain, chronic fatigue—and zeroes in on del Molino’s contrast between the way that the disease affected Stalin (and his two henchmen who also had psoriasis) and Updike:

“Conversely, on a happier note, Updike credited his psoriasis as the driving force of his talent, remarking in his memoirs that: ‘Whenever in my timid life I have shown some courage and originality it has been because of my skin.'”

Updike famously wrote about his psoriasis in “At War with My Skin,” which was first published in The New Yorker and then became one of the central essays in Self-Consciousness: A Memoir (1989). Handwritten jottings that appear to be the start of the essay are on display at The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.

Del Molino also referred to Updike in his Dec. 16, 2021 opinion piece that was published in The New York Times: “Very few dared to write in any depth about their illness. John Updike is one exception. He dedicated a novel and part of his memoirs to psoriasis, and it was thanks to those that I became aware of my own monstrous nature. I wrote a book to explain myself through these figures. My life, like theirs, is governed by my skin condition.” Part of that quote appears as well in del Molino’s first-person account written for Asharq Al-Awsat on Dec. 25, 2021 titled “What Makes Me a Monster.”

Updike Society members publish second collaboration

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A second collaborative collection of essays by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan in Switzerland. Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts contains an essay on “John Updike in Serbia” by Biljana Dojčinović and Nemanja Glintić. Other writers covered in the book include Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Danzy Senna, Marilynne Robinson, Jesmyn Ward, William T. Vollmann, Toni Morrison, and Charles Yu. Also included is an additional resource provided by Norton: “Incorporating One’s Own Literary Criticism into the Curriculum: The Teachable Essay via John Updike’s Short Stories.” The book is also available as a Kindle edition.

From the publisher:
This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University in Reading, Pa. He is the author or editor of 20 scholarly books, including Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (2019). Sue Norton is Lecturer of English at Technological University Dublin, Ireland. She has published numerous articles and essays on topics in American literature as well as on classroom practice. Together they edited European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018).

Beverly Farms bookshop starts Updike namesake podcast

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Shelf Awareness reports that owners of The Book Shop of Beverly Farms has started a biweekly podcast they’re calling “John Updike’s Ghost,” which “features casual discussions between the store owners–siblings Hannah Harlow and Sam Pfeifle–about what they’re reading, running the store, how they match books with readers and more. Harlow and Pfeifle bought the store two years ago.

“These are the kinds of conversations we have with people who come into the shop all the time,” Pfeifle told Shelf Awareness. “People think you have to read hard books, or that you have to finish everything you start, or that long books are too intimidating. We want them to hear that we read romances and mysteries, too, and that we think some books aren’t working for us at all and just put them down all the time. And reading books should be fun! It shouldn’t feel like work,” Pfeifle said.

The article noted that the podcast is named after Updike because “the store thinks of him as its ‘patron saint.’ The owners explained: “As a long-time resident of Beverly Farms, the Book Shop was his local source for books, and he frequented the spot, which first opened in 1968. As Harlow and Pfeifle learn more about his role in the community, his philosophy on reading and writing, and the way his catalog stands up to contemporary scrutiny, Updike’s presence really seems to resonate through the Shop.”

Book explores Updike and others as religious writers

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Books published during the COVID quarantine tend not to be on anyone’s radar, but one of them just came to our attention: Listening for God: Malamud, O’Connor, Updike & Morrison, by Peter C. Brown (Mercer University Press, 2020).

Of course, Brown isn’t alone in considering Updike as a religious writer. The very first monograph on Updike, Alice and Kenneth Hamilton’s The Elements of John Updike (1970), heavily weighed the Protestantism that underscored much of Updike’s fiction, and James Yerkes’ John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (1999) broached the subject from a variety of perspectives. More recently, another Mercer University Press publication, Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories, by David Crowe, explored the religious-philosophical implications of Updike’s Richard and Joan Maple stories.

If you’re wondering if there’s anything left to say, in literary scholarship the answer is almost always yes. That’s certainly the case with this book by Brown, who taught philosophy and Great books for 40+ years at Mercer University.

As the press release for this volume points out, “Peter Brown offers a highly interdisciplinary examination of these four authors who represent four different faith traditions within Judeo-Christianity: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). All subversive writers, they work in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and open us, their readers, to something more, something that transcends time and fate.”

The key phrase here is “undermine their own stories,” and Brown is careful to draw a distinction between the protagonists, the narrator, and the author, and to note how these authors interrogate religion with their own brand of dialectical approach. He’s careful to draw a distinction between Updike and his alter ego, Rabbit Angstrom.

The Updike chapter, “Updike’s Secular Pilgrims,” has a title that may seem familiar to readers well-versed in Updike criticism. But Brown finds more to say. He focuses on the Rabbit novels and novella. “What is Rabbit’s problem?” Brown asks in the subtitled section dealing with the first novel. “He is looking within for a vaguely remembered God.” Brown asks, “What are we meant to think of Rabbit? The question is inescapable—Updike insists that we ask it.” While considering the conundrum of God’s judgment, Brown posits, “It’s not the content of the judgment that matters or its casuist application; it’s the vertical dimension it opens in Being: the Sacred. Updike defeats every attempt to bring Rabbit within the ordinary gambit of right and wrong—without abandoning him to the worship of his own worst (or best) instincts.”

By the time of Rabbit Redux, Brown argues, “Rabbit as ‘Christian’ everyman fits the parody. He is burdened with a Biblical sense of sin and been told (in that long ago Sunday school) that salvation/resurrection is promised. Unable to find his own way to the Celestial City of deliverance, instead he follows a ‘shining light’ that only he sees and leaves his wife and children to pursue it.”

With Rabbit Is Rich, Brown suggests that Kruppenbach’s question to Jack Eccles resonates: “How does God see all this? In 1980, America is Updike’s Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no redeeming factor ….” But in Rabbit at Rest, “Updike nudges Rabbit onto a larger stage, not just the evolving tragi-comic setting for his picaresque antics in the first three novels, but a secular world remorselessly molding him from the inside out . . . as he struggles nevertheless to shape a moral realm within his kingdom of self. Whatever it was in Rabbit that sustained Updike’s attention over three decades and four novels rises toward a kind of tragic nobility as he grapples with his mortality and with his son, his only hedge against mortality.”

Such insights resonate even more when read against the conclusions that Brown draws about the fictions of Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison. It’s a welcome addition to Updike studies.

The book, in hardcover, is 255 pages long, priced at $35. Here’s the Amazon link.

Updike recalled in well-known painter-writer’s short story collection

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Born in 1946 in Ressen,Bulgaria, Dimitri Vojnov is a well-known artist (oils, acrylics, pastels, sculptures) living in Germany who is recognized by The Europa Authentica Cultural Organization as a Magister Artis.

In 2020, he published a collection of short-short stories and illustrations, Ready for New York (Norderstedt, Germany: Kelkheim, 2020). One of the stories is devoted to John Updike, whom Vojnov said “was a great inspiration to me.”

His website features a poem that in English reads, “I have pledged myself to painting, / like a monk to his church. / I do not preach, I confess. / I am not a painter, / I am a confessor”. Below is that story, “John Updike: Our Sex Instructor.” Ready for New York, is available in an Amazon Kindle edition.

Updike book a perfect read for the Covid holidays?

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As the pandemic rages on, many people are tending toward rage as well. Or at least a profound feeling of being “over it all.” Or disappointment that the usual holiday gatherings had to be abandoned. But the 746 Books blog reminds us that John Updike’s offbeat Christmas book might be just what the epidemiologist ordered.

In “Alternative Christmas Reading!” 746 Books recommends Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas:

“John Updike’s wry observations paired with Edward Gorey’s off-kilter illustrations make for a decidedly different festive reading experience! From impractical miniature reindeer to alcoholic Santa’s Updike expores the more disappointing side of this most wonderful time of the year!”

New Updike monograph by Fromer now available for pre-order

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The Moderate Imagination: The Political Thought of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism, a monograph by John Updike Society member Yoav Fromer, is now available for pre-orders at Amazon.com.

Scheduled for June 12, 2020 publication by the University Press of Kansas, the new critical work on Updike is 288 pages, hardcover, and priced at $39.95.  Here’s the description:

“In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white, working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential rust-belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era, but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it.

“Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt ‘left behind.’ In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash.

“A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.”

Updike’s Rabbit named one of The 100 Greatest Literary Characters

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The characters aren’t ranked, but John Updike’s most famous fictional creation, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, made the cut to be included in The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, published July 2019 by Rowman & Littlefield.

The authors of the volume—James Plath, Gail Sinclair, and Kirk Curnutt—considered previous lists, plus recommendations from 100 writers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers they polled in order to come up with a list of “characters who have become larger than their lives on the page”—those that are “time-honored reader favorites, prototypes, and cultural influencers . . . who have somehow entered the collective public consciousness, ones who were influential models for others to follow, and ones who have been so popular with readers that they have become significant, memorable, or even cherished.”

Of Rabbit, Plath writes, “Literature is full of heroes and antiheroes, but Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is uniquely average—a flawed, irrepressible, and often unlikable human being who is still somehow so endearing to audiences worldwide that one novel couldn’t contain him.” He’s “unfaithful, impulse driven, prejudiced, and old-fashioned when it comes to women. But he is a seeker, a quester of truth. With a healthy libido and appetite for life, Rabbit, though in many ways a typical American male, nonetheless manages to see everyday objects and people in a more brilliant and illuminating light than the average person. He has never lost his childlike sense of wonder—a rare quality that draws people toward him.”

The author with the most characters in the book is Charles Dickens, whose Miss Havisham, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Oliver Twist were included. Among Updike’s contemporaries, Toni Morrison had two (Pilate Dead and Sethe), while Philip Roth and Saul Bellow had one each (Alexander Portnoy and Eugene Henderson, respectively).

The book is available from Amazon.

 

Updike cited in new Adam Gopnik book

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In reviewing Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, Howard Schneider writes that Gopnik celebrates liberalism and argues that liberalism “has been the source of all that’s civically decent and humane in the world for at least the last two centuries.” Schneider also takes exception with Gopnik’s characterization of John Updike, who is referenced in the volume:

“Two perhaps nitpicking points, but I think the author is wrong about them. Was John Updike really ‘religiously obsessed’? Yes, some of his novels incisively assay religiosity, but he was too urbane to be besotted with religion. Gopnik also suggests that good science can’t thrive in a tyranny. Nazi Germany and North Korea, unfortunately, prove otherwise.”

“A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism”