Category Archives: Books

Review of The Violet Hour cites Updike

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VioletHourKatie Roiphe included John Updike in her book The Violet Hour, so it’s no surprise that a review of that book would cite Updike, as Shirley Hershey Showalter did for The Christian Century. In “Death’s call and our response,” published October 2, 2016, she writes,

“Kalanithi uses a quotation from Montaigne as an epilogue: ‘If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.’ The quotation could apply to Katie Roiphe’s book also. The Violet Hour takes up Montaigne’s challenge but with less confidence in the outcome. Roiphe roiled cultural waters in the 1990s withThe Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism. The Violet Hour defies genre, mixing memoir, journalism, biography, and literary criticism as it ponders the dying of six writers—Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, James Salter, and Susan Sontag.”

Later, she writes, “Updike is the only practicing Christian in the group. His lifelong devotion to the Book of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Church present a puzzle to Roiphe. She’s not tripped up by the apparent contradiction of his adulteries; she has a special interest in his linking of adultery and immortality: ‘I have a soft spot for those who try to defeat death with sex.’ It’s irony, not sex, that makes it difficult for her to understand Updike’s religious life.

“She explains in an endnote that Updike’s biographer Adam Begley helped her see continuity where she could only see confusion. Updike’s final book of poems, Endpoints, includes these lines about clergymen: ‘comical purveyors / of what makes sense to just the terrified.’ Roiphe settles on this explanation: ‘Updike approached everything under the sun with irony, including his deeper passions, his beliefs, his sources of marvel and awe.'”

Here’s the full article.

Member’s book on Updike’s fiction now available for pre-order

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farmerbookMichial Farmer, who presented a paper on “The Failure of Moderation in Buchanan Dying and Memories of the Ford Administration” at the Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, S.C., has written a book on Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction that is now available for pre-order from Camden House and Amazon. The book (236pp., cloth) is scheduled for March 2017 publication.

From the Boydell and Brewer website:

“Concentrating on the role of the imagination in Updike’s works, this book shows him to be an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.

“This book looks past the frequently discussed autobiographical nature of John Updike’s fiction to consider the role in Updike’s work of the most powerful and peculiar human faculty: the imagination. Michial 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. Farmer builds his argument on the metaphysics of Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist thinker who has been largely neglected in discussions of Updike’s aesthetics. The book demonstrates the degree to which Updike was an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.”

Michial Farmer is Assistant Professor of English at Crown College, Saint Bonifacius, Minnesota.

Updike mentioned in short story collection

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dontcoverIn Don’t I Know You?, writer Marni Jackson presents a collection of linked stories detailing the exploits of fictional writer Rose McEwan, with an author’s note explaining the fine line between fiction and reality:  “These stories are works of fiction” infused with “autobiographical elements”? But hasn’t it always been so?

As reviewer Philip Marchand notes, “The stories are of two kinds: the first, the predominant strain, are plausible narratives in which one can easily imagine the celebrity in question. ‘Doon,’ which launches the collection, introduces Rose as an adolescent writer taking a creative writing course taught by a scarcely older young man, one John Updike. Here is the first challenge faced by Jackson: how to create a character convincing in its outlines, compared to the ‘real’ person bearing that name.

“It can be delicate. In the story featuring Bob Dylan, the author must ponder mundane details and make them convincing. For example, how does the great Bob Dylan brush his teeth? Jackson must decide. ‘For several minutes he scoured his teeth over the kitchen sink, brushing and spitting methodically,’ she writes. Does he floss? Yes, asserts Jackson. ‘Then he flossed, making the thread pock rhythmically.’

“Updike reveals himself in a different way. Watching Rose sew, his curiosity is aroused by the white trim along the bottom of her sleeveless top. ‘I like that,’ he says. But he is a writer: it is not enough for something to catch his fancy—it must have a name. And what does this object call itself? ‘Rickrack,’ she tells Updike.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Jackson did lift ‘rickrack’ from the great mass of Updike prose. . . .

“In ‘Doon’ and ‘Free Love’ the celebrities are more witnesses than participants, although Updike does play a significant part in Rose’s growth and development. (‘I didn’t think playfulness and humor were allowed,’ she states at one point, and it is not hard to see the hand of Updike in this revelation.) . . . .”

Here’s the full review:  “Meet Leonard Cohen the ice cream vendor and Keith Richards the surgeon in Marni Jackson’s Don’t I Know You?”

Poems That Make Grown Women Cry features Updike

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Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 8.02.56 AMAn anthology on Poems That Make Grown Women Cry: 100 Women on the Words That Move Them, edited by Anthony and Ben Holden and published this past spring, includes an essay by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown on John Updike’s poem, “Perfection Wasted.”

The book is a follow-up to the father-and-son team’s Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. For the most recent volume they worked with Amnesty Internation and asked the same question of 100 “remarkable women”: “What poem has moved you to tears?”

Here’s the Amazon.com link. You can read “Perfection Wasted” on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion post from Jan. 31, 2009.

New member book on Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike

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CASCADE_TemplateJohn McTavish, whom John Updike Society members know from past conferences, has published a book on Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike with Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

McTavish, a minister of the United Church of Canada, had previously published essays on Updike in such journals as Touchstone, Theology Today, The United Church Observer, and The Presbyterian Record.

Although the book is so new that it doesn’t appear yet on the Wipf and Stock website, we can share the back flap copy:

“Big on style, slight on substance: that has been a common charge over the years by critics of John Updike. In fact, however, John Updike is one of the most serious writers of modern times. Myth, as this book shows, unlocks his fictional universe and repeatedly breaks open the powerful themes in his literary parables of the gospel. Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike also includes a personal tribute to John by his son David, two essays by pioneer Updike scholars Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, and an anecdotal chapter in which readers share Updike discoveries and recommendations. All in all, weight is added to the complaint that the master of myth and gospel was shortchanged by the Nobel committee.”

Monograph on writers and religion includes Updike

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Screen Shot 2016-05-14 at 7.39.00 AMJohn Updike Society member Liliana M. Naydan, Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Coordinator at Penn State Abington, has recently published a book on writers and religion that includes (not surprisingly) a chapter on Updike.

According to the Amazon.com description, Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (234pp., Bucknell Univ. Press) “considers the way in which contemporary American authors address the subject of belief in the post-9/11 Age of Terror. Naydan suggests that after 9/11, fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Laila Halaby, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Barbara Kingsolver dramatizes and works to resolve impasses that exist between believers of different kinds at the extremes. These impasses emerge out of the religious paradox that shapes America as simultaneously theocratic and secular, and they exist, for instance, between liberals and fundamentalists, between liberals and certain evangelicals, between fundamentalists and artists, and between fundamentalists of different varieties. Ultimately, Naydan argues that these authors function as literary theologians of sorts and forge a relevant space beyond or between extremes. They fashion faith or lack thereof as hybridized and hence as a negotiation among secularism, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, and fanaticism. In so doing, they invite their readers into contemplations of religious difference and new ways of memorializing 9/11.”

The essay on Updike is titled “Emergent Varieties of Religious Experience from a Protestant Perspective: Fundamentalist, Fanatical, and Hybrid Faith in John Updike’s ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ and Terrorist.”

Will we ever see another Rabbit or Portnoy?

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08COLAPINTO-4-master180That’s the question that comes immediately to mind when you read Steven Kurutz’s New York Times feature “John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel.”

Colapinto’s novel Undone has been deemed “too tricky” because of its frank subject matter. Forty-one publishers turned it down before a small independent press in Canada decided to take a chance. And yet, as Kurutz points out, “Roth, Mailer and Updike were far more graphic in their descriptions decades ago. So why not be explicit in 2016?

“‘I can’t do it,’ Mr. Colapinto said. ‘I can’t go there. It shocks me when I see Updike do it.'”

That won’t set well with Katie Roiphe, whom Kurutz describes as having “lamented the inability of male novelists to reckon with lust in a 2009 essay in The New York Times, and not much has changed in the years since. For the crew of writers that includes Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, she wrote, ‘Innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.'”

So will we ever see another Rabbit or Portnoy? Not if 41 publishers pass on a novel that seems tame by comparison.

Great Writers at the End book includes Updike

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VioletHourNew from The Dial Press is The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, by Katie Roiphe, who, as a New Republic review-article notes, “explores the final days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, and other writers at the end.”

Of the book, William Giraldi writes, “Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant rigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper.

“Each chapter, skillfully eliding overlap, constitutes a ‘biography backward, a whole life unfurling from a death.’ In the slow fade of her five writers—cancer came for Sontag, Freud, and Updike; a stroke felled Sendak; Thomas decimated himself exuberantly with drink—Roiphe finds ‘glimpses of bravery, of beauty . . . of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion.'”

“Roiphe flashes her richness of mind most intently on Updike,” Giraldi writes. “In Updike’s work, ‘one is struck not by the glittering seductions of the sharp, ambitious, sexually enthralling mistresses but by the deep, agonized love the husbands feel for the first wives.’ She commands a supercharged insight into Updike’s religio-sexual realm that many critics, female and male both, are too ideological or outright painterly to muster. . . .

“Whole swaths of Updike’s work are ‘about not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep, cheating, tricking, denouncing it, protesting it, fixating on it; so much involves the hope for more than our animal walk, an afterlife, or, better yet, more life.’ His unkillable buoyancy of language, his style that pursued every contour and lineation of living: No other major American novelist has been so downright delighted by the tensile strength of English, no one else so wedded to the notion of writing as deliverance. . . .”

Here’s the full review-article. The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

Writer Sebastian Faulks’ picks six, including Updike

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Screen Shot 2016-02-06 at 5.14.05 PMWriter Sebastian Faulks shared his six favorite books with The Week, and one of them is by John Updike.

In “Sebastian Faulks’ 6 favorite books,” posted 6 Feb. 2016, he names, in no apparent order, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, The Rack by A.E. Ellis, The House on Moon Lake by Francesca Duranti, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, and Endpoint, by Updike.

In choosing the latter Faulks writes, “John Updike kept writing even as he lay dying in the hospital: the man as pen. In his last poems he gives thanks for his life and his ability to write in verses that are unsentimental and at times deeply moving. An Updike character once said that in death what he would most miss was not being alive, but being American. A wonderful farewell to his readers.”

Faulks recent novel is Where My Heart Used to Beat, a work of historical fiction about a psychiatrist who comes to terms with memories of World War II and his father’s past.

Updike quoted in review of Murdoch journal

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Screen Shot 2016-02-06 at 8.03.01 AMIn reviewing Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995 (Princeton Univ. Press) for the National Post, Robert Fulford cited John Updike prominently. His review begins,

“Dame Iris Murdoch, a much-admired novelist for several decades, was also a bold sexual adventuress. Perhaps she was a love addict before that term was popularized in the 1970s (and with it the 12-step program, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous). She had many lovers and a close attention to sex was crucial in her life and art.

“According to John Updike, love was for Murdoch what the sea was for Joseph Conrad and war was for Ernest Hemingway. Updike considered her the leading English novelist of her time and believed she learned the human condition through her relationships. Her tumultuous love life, he wrote, was ‘a long tutorial in suffering, power, treachery, and bliss.’ Updike believed that in reading her novels he could feel the ideas, images and personalities of her life pouring through her.”

“The intimate biography of Iris Murdoch,” by Robert Fulford