New Yorker copy editor talks about work . . . and Updike

Posted on February 16, 2015 by James Plath

In an essay titled “Holy Writ: Learning to love the house style,” Mary Norris writes a “personal history” that covers her first job and how she came to be a copy editor for The New Yorker. She also talks about some of the writers she admired, among them, John Updike:

“And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. . . .

“I was on the copydesk when John McPhee’s pieces on geology were set up. I tried to keep my head. There was not much to do. McPhee was like John Updike, in that he turned in immaculate copy. Really, all I had to do was read,” she writes.

Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and has been a query proofreader at the magazine since 1993. Her book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. on April 6, 2015.

Updike and Kierkegaard spotlighted in a new book

Posted on February 13, 2015 by James Plath

David Crowe, Professor of English at Augustana College, recently saw his book on Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories published by Mercer Press.

According to an article in the Aledo Times Record, Crowe tells the “story of Updike’s life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career” and traces “the subsequent evolution of Updike’s complex and coherent theology.”

Crowe told the Times Record, “I wrote the book so that even people who haven’t read Kierkegaard can get up to speed on his central claims. Unlike most literary critics, I also avoid jargon and believe that if you can’t state a theory plainly and clearly you’re probably hiding something.”

George Hunt devoted a great deal of time and space to a discussion of Kierkegaard in his seminal work on Updike’s “three great secret things,” but this is the first book-length study on Updike and Kierkegaard.

We’ll post a review of the book on this site within the next week.

Becoming John Updike now available in paperback

Posted on January 9, 2015 by James Plath

Larry Mazzeno’s book, Becoming John Updike, will be published in paperback the first week in February.

John Updike Society members and friends can take advantage of a 25 percent off offer from the publisher:

Becoming John Updike [pb]

Entertainment Monthly shares Top Five Anti-Holiday Reads

Posted on January 1, 2015 by James Plath

There haven’t been many Grinches or Scrooges or shouts of “Bah Humbug” this holiday season, but Entertainment Weekly has offered the next best thing:

“‘Tis (Not) The Season: Top Five Anti-Holiday Reads.”

Updike has been making a lot of “best” lists this season, and he makes this one as well, coming in at #2 right behind Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with a book that may be unfamiliar to many Updike fans: The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, featuring illustrations by fellow Harvard alum Edward Gorey. The hardcover book was published in 2006 by Pomegranate Communications and released in a revised edition a year later. You can find a copy, as with almost all out-of-print books, at Abebooks.com.

In making the selection, Entertainment Monthly‘s Madeline Poage writes, “An old one, but a good one, Updike’s wry voice and natural sense of humor flows organically through this compact work. A deconstruction of every facet of Christmas, the book unpacks every ritual and tradition down to the bare bones. Mercilessly witty and disturbingly accurate, every aspect of Christmas if put to the test against logic—what are Santa’s true motives? How do reindeer landing of roofs not destroy them by accident? Do the elves need a union? And of this wouldn’t be complete without Edward Gorey’s illustrations, haunting and stark on every page. For anyone tired of the Christmas hype, this is an absolute must.”

Pennsylvania locals interviewed by Begley rate his biography

Posted on September 29, 2014 by James Plath

Bruce Posten of the Reading Eagle wrote a story in anticipation of Adam Begley’s visit to Reading for the Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference in which he spoke to three classmates and Updike’s Shillington contact and asked what they thought of the biography, Updike.

Dave Silcox, who served as Site Director for the first Updike Society conference at Alvernia University, said he’d give it an A, “but with a few key reservations.”

“I give Begley good grades for his book and I feel his attention to detail was impressive,” Silcox said. “I like the way he structured the book interweaving everything with John’s writings, even though John probably would have been very upset over Begley’s effort to show that so much of his work was autobiographical in nature.

“Had Martha (Updike’s second wife, who survives, as does his first wife, Mary) cooperated with Begley, maybe much more of the real person would have come out, assuming she (Martha) would have been willing to talk about the real person behind the man of letters,” Silcox said. “He (Begley) tried to fill that in by interviewing friends, but Updike had very few close friends after leaving Ipswich.”

“Updike classmates interviewed for biography.”

Daily Beast picks Updike as a Best Biography

Posted on July 6, 2014 by James Plath

In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”

Of Updike, they wrote:

“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”

These Violent Delights names Updike a Best Book

Posted on June 27, 2014 by James Plath

Tom Shone, whose blog, These Violent Delights, is read on both sides of the Atlantic, has released his “Best of 2014 So Far” lists of films, books, music, television, and performances, and Adam Begley’s Updike tops the list of best reads.

Behind it is Mark Harris’s Five Came Back, The Wes Anderson Collection by Matt Zoller Seitz, Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, and Bark, from Lorrie Moore.

Shone’s top films, for the sake of comparison, are Under the Skin, Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood, We’re the Best! and Edge of Tomorrow.

Here’s the full article.

Amazon book editors pick Begley’s bio as the best of 2014 . . . so far

Posted on June 25, 2014 by James Plath

The Amazon.com book editors have released their list of Top 10 Books of the Year So Far, and topping it is Updike, by Adam Begley.

“This biography of the American master goes far beyond simple chronology of this complex (and often paradoxical) character, layering on the lit crit where his real life bled into novels. Detailed and compulsively readable, Updike is essential for admirers, and illuminating for anyone with an interest in literature.”

Digital Book World has the full story and full list, and they quote Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print and Kindle Books at Amazon: “Updike may seem like an unusual choice for our number one pick, but it’s poised to be one of the best biographies of 2014. It’s a candid, enthralling book that readers won’t be able to put down.”

If you’re curious about where Updike ranks in sales, at Amazon it’s currently number 3,209 in books and number 26 in the category of biographies and memoirs.

Updike included in an Everyman’s Library fatherhood anthology

Posted on June 2, 2014 by James Plath

On May 13, Everyman’s Library published a volume in their Everyman’s Pocket Classics series that revolves around the theme of fatherhood.

Stories of Fatherhood, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, includes the John Updike short story “My Father’s Tears,” and is available in both hardcover and paperback.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

“Stories of Fatherhood gathers more than a century of classic short stories about having, becoming, loving, and losing fathers.

“Frank O’Connor’s hilarious tale of a tiny boy’s war against his paternal rival in “My Oedipus Complex” sits beside Ann Packer’s touching portrait of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth. At the other end of the lifespan, John Updike’s “My Father’s Tears,” Jim Shepard’s “The Mortality of Parents,” and William Maxwell’s “The man who lost his father” bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other.

“In between, we encounter a full range of emotions connecting men and their offspring: tenderness and devotion, anxiety and incomprehension, admiration and regret. Powerful patriarchs cast a long shadow in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Christening,” while Edith Wharton’s “His Father’s Son” sheds a more ironic light on the paternal legacy. E. L. Doctorow’s young protagonist, forced to write letters impersonating his dead father, arrives at a deeper understanding of him, while in Helen Simpson’s “Sorry?” an old man’s hearing aid seems to reveal what his children secretly think about him.

“Paternal bonds are forged outside biology, too: Graham Swift portrays a man wistfully seeking a substitute son, while Guy de Maupassant’s forlorn waif triumphantly acquires an ideal father. In these twenty stories, an array of great writers—ranging from Kafka, Joyce, and Nabokov to Raymond Carver, Harold Brodkey, and Andre Dubus—offers a wonderfully varied assortment of fictional takes on paternity.”

Read too, if you’re curious, a review/article by Peter Tonguette for The Christian Science Monitor: “‘Stories of Fatherhood’ offers 17 portraits of parenting from a very diverse group of writers.”

List price for the hardcover is $16.00, but Amazon.com is currently selling it for $12.19.

Updike gets a mention in The Keillor Reader

Posted on May 28, 2014 by James Plath

Garrison Keillor, the NPR humorist best known for his tall tales of Lake Wobegon, published a new book earlier this month, and member Larry Randen reports that John Updike is prominently mentioned in the introduction of The Keillor Reader:

“I think often of John Updike, who lovingly re-created the backyards and clotheslines of the 1940s small town and described a snowstorm as ‘an immense whispering’ and wrote beautifully of his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform and astonishing him by planting a kiss on his cheek. I last saw John on the New York subway, riding from 155th Street down to 72nd, a white-haired gent of seventy-five grinning like a school kid. At 110th a gang of seminarians boarded and crowded around him, chattering, not recognizing him, and he sat soaking it up, delighted, surrounded by material” (xxxi).

Randen says that he and his wife, Lollie, went to hear Keillor read from his new book at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., and that Updike also was mentioned during a Q&A session.

According to Randen, “The first question was: ‘Who is/was your favorite writer?’ Keillor said, ‘John Updike’ and offered a few sentences about how good Updike’s writing was and then added an anecdote about ‘The Last Time I Saw Updike a Couple Years Before His Death.’

“In his response to the first question he told the same account [as he included in the introduction] but added that ‘the seminarians were excitedly arguing about Karl Barth, a favorite neo-orthodox theologian who was also a favorite of Updike’s; the students had just come from a lecture about Barth and were caught up with discussing issues about Barth, pro and con, and hearing this pleased Updike to no end as he sat there anonymously soaking the moment up and smiling, perhaps, because another generation had discovered Barth.”

Here’s a link to the Amazon.com sell-page for The Keillor Reader, where you can “look inside” and see the table of contents and a sample chapter.

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

Celebrating one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century

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