Several days ago the BBC ran a program that the website is listing as “David Baddiel on John Updike.” Click on the pop-up option and you’ll be able to hear the 30-minute broadcast.

“There can be few successful novelists who so divide critical opinion,” Matthew Parris begins. “John Updike was one of the 20th century’s most read of serious American writers” whose style charmed most critics, but, he adds, most famously not Harold Bloom, who called him a minor novelist with a major style.

Parris talks to guest David Baddiel, who builds a case for John Updike, as well as Justin Cartwright, a novelist himself.

“I think it’s a huge mistake to think that the ‘mundane’ is easier to write,” Cartwright says, comparing Updike to George Eliot and Jane Austen.

On November 22, a special broadcast of Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts titled “Updike Redux” featured two of the readings that were a part of the Library of America / Symphony Space event last October 16. Now, those who missed it can access the show online. It’s available as a podcast. To hear it, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Listen to the Show” button.

The show opens with Tony Kushner reading from the introduction to Updike’s 2003 Knopf volume The Early Stories. Then, in the story “Unstuck,” a minor mishap strengthens a young couple’s marriage. That story is read by the show’s guest host, Jane Kaczmarek. Two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, making her Selected Shorts debut, concludes the program by reading Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite,” in which an aging man looks back on his life and loves.

“Mrs Updike,” a 90-minute radio play by Margaret Heffernan “about the tempestuous relationship between one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century, John Updike, and his mother,” was broadcast today by BBC Radio and can be heard online for the next seven days. Thanks to member Andrew Moorhouse for tipping us off to it.

“Mrs Updike” features Eileen Atkins as the title character, Charles Edwards as John Updike, Josef Lindsay as Young John Updike, Stuart Milligan as Wesley, Garrick Hagon as Springer, Joseph May as the Interviewer, and Lorelei King as Lara. Heffernan has written three plays for radio, “including a pair of plays about Enron.”  Continue reading →