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

Posted on May 21, 2016 by James Plath

John 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

Posted on May 14, 2016 by James Plath

John 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?

Posted on April 10, 2016 by James Plath

That’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

Posted on March 3, 2016 by James Plath

New 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

Posted on February 6, 2016 by James Plath

Writer 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

Posted on February 6, 2016 by James Plath

In 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

Updike-edited gift recalled

Posted on January 6, 2016 by James Plath

In the online “Books: The gift I’ll never forget” section of The Guardian, Sloane Crosley recently shared “The book that reminded me America could be magical too.”

It was 1999 and Crosley, who was studying in Scotland and reluctant to leave, recalled how she “fell in love with Edinburgh so intensely” that she “literally fell (first night, Victoria Street, knees skinned). A magical place that smells of salt, hops and sewage, and features a sizable castle sticking up in the middle, Edinburgh was mind-blowing to a young American.”

She talks about how her parents, never good gift-givers, found the perfect way to welcome her home. “There, waiting on my bed, was a 775-page brick of a book. The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and inscribed by my father: ‘Welcome to America – we’re not so bad.’

“I had not spoken to my parents about how sad I was to leave Scotland. I had barely spoken to them about how much I loved it. But still, they knew. Not only that, they acted on that knowing without laundering it through their own impulses. They did not buy me thistle-patterned linens or play bagpipe recordings. This was a gift truly for me; 100 reminders of why home was still beautiful and funny and complex.”

Angell book offers Updike insights

Posted on November 27, 2015 by James Plath

On November 17, 2015, Doubleday published This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell (320pp., cloth, SRP $26.95), and Updike Society member Bruce Moyer says that the selected writings from the acclaimed New Yorker writer and editor include editorial notes for John Updike.

One of the reviewers at Amazon.com seconds the notion: “Personal observations such as the insight into John Updike are gems on their own.”

Amazon is currently selling the book in hardcover/cloth for $17.51, or 35 percent off list price.

New short story anthology includes Pigeon Feathers

Posted on October 10, 2015 by James Plath

On October 6, 2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. And, of course, Updike was included.

This is the best of the best, really, as it’s culled from The Best American Short Stories Series. This is the centennial celebration of the series.

The editors were careful to distribute their picks so that a wide range of American authors could be represented, and no author got more than one story in this collection—though, of course, many writers deserved more than one.

Their are some surprises, but for the classic American authors the classic stories seem to have been chosen. Ernest Hemingway’s “My Old Man” was included, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers” made the cut, as did Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” along with frequent anthology standards like John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Raymond Carver fans might be surprised that “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” was selected over “Cathedral” or “So Much Water So Close to Home,” as might Donald Barthelme fans that “The School” (a great short story) was chosen over some of his more popular ones. The editors clearly put some thought into this, and the fact that a Pennsylvania story was chosen from Updike reinforces how much his home state meant to his fiction . . . and poetry, and creative non-fiction and criticism.

New Yorker runs previously unpublished Updike poem

Posted on September 28, 2015 by James Plath

John Updike’s previously unpublished early poem “Coming into New York” appears on page 38 of the October 5 issue of The New Yorker, on sale at newsstands today.

The poem is also available online, here: “Coming into New York.” Both a printed version of the poem appears, as well as a recording of Brad Leithauser reading Updike’s poem.

Leithauser provided the introduction to John Updike: Selected Poems (Knopf), edited by Christopher Carduff. That volume hits bookstores on October 13, 2015 (Amazon link).

Brad Leithauser reading “Coming into New York.”

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

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