Category Archives: First Person Singular

Rabbit still runs in Pennsylvania

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Toward the end of 2025 the Reading Eagle published a piece of columnist kismet titled, “Guy walks into a bar . . . sees the rest of Rabbit, Run.” That’s right. In it, Steven Henshaw talked about a column he wrote about Updike’s most famous novel after seeing the film version on DVD. “I had low expectations for the 1970 film starring James Caan. How could Updike’s prose translate to the screen? Still, I was curious because many scenes were shot in Reading, the author’s hometown.

“That column focused on how downtown Reading still looks much as it did when the movie was filmed a half-century ago — reason enough for hope after decades of decline. What I didn’t mention was that I returned the DVD to the library without finishing it.” As it turned out, Rabbit may have run, but this columnist couldn’t run from Rabbit.

“On my way home from another event recently, I stopped at Mike’s Tavern in Riverside for a beer. It was exactly 9 p.m. on a Thursday, and the place felt different. The lights were dimmer than usual, nearly every barstool filled.

“What’s going on?” I asked bartender Jon Owens.

“I’m showing ‘Rabbit, Run,’” he said. “It was filmed in Reading.”

“That night, thanks to a chance stop at a neighborhood bar, I finally finished the movie I hadn’t meant to. Call it coincidence — or, better yet, serendipity,” Henshaw wrote.

Read his whole column

Sociology professor offers his take on Updike’s ‘Toward the End of Time’

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On Feb. 1, 2026, Martin Wenglinsky, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University, posted on his blog the first of his two-part examination of John Updike’s futuristic novel, Toward the End of Time, which he called a “deficient” or “deformed” epic.

“Let me explain,” Wenglinsky wrote. “An epic is a story of war and family and a journey and one or more heroic protagonists and what might be endlessly elaborated episodes that convey some deep meaning about human nature, while novels, which are another kind of deformed epics, have protagonists whose histories are never retold but made up and just trying to manage life.”

In Toward the End of Time, Wenglinsky wrote, “The war envisioned is a limited exchange of atomic weapons between China and the United States that takes place a few decades in the future of the time the novel was published. The people in the novel are civilians trying to cope with the aftermath, which makes sense because the war that engulfed the world in the second half of the twentieth century was the Cold War, which had hot skirmishes in Korea and Vietnam and the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan, but unlike in other wars mostly in prospect, a full out exchange never happening even if many predicted it, imaginations filled with the nuclear apocalypse just thirty minutes away from total mutual destruction. So this war is a science fiction war, and Updike’s innovation is that there is a limited exchange so that the United States has had severe but not total annihilation, which is different from apocalyptic science fiction projections as happens in Shute’s On the Beach (1957), or Christopher’s No Blade of Glass (1956) or Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) or to my mind the most scary documentary style BBC production, Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984)) which showed the reduction of England to a medieval economy and society. Rather, the United States, in Updike’s imagination, remains organized even if diminished and it is unclear whether it will recover or fall into anarchy.

“Updike’s novel is no reduction of a society into Hobbesian anarchy. Seafood is shipped from the East Coast to the decimated Midwest. Commerce also continues in that protection rackets spring up and young women openly advertise their personal services in the major newspapers and a local scrip has replaced the United States dollar but there are still country clubs and Federal Express and mail service  and a diminished food market in some stands around downtown Boston. What Updike retains from the apocalyptic genre, which is only somewhere in the epic mode, as is the case with “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (c. 1400), which is full of foreboding about what will be the fatal mistake of the hero, is a sense of dread and despair: that something even worse will happen and that  the eventual fate cannot be avoided however people battle on to restore what was once normal life. Achieving that tone in a less than complete apocalypse is a considerable achievement for Updike.

“But there is much more going on than that,” Wenglinsky wrote.

Read Part 1 of his essay, “John Updike: Toward the End of Time“

 

Updike died . . . and got better, writer says

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In “How John Updike Died and Got Better,” an essay that’s both artful and thoughtful, Alexander Sorondo wrote, “John Updike wrote and published constantly for 40 years. More than 70 titles. Thousands of articles. Mostly for The New Yorker. He sold millions of books and his Rabbit Angstrom quartet is celebrated as a pillar of American literary achievement in the 20th century. . . . Couples was a hit. It earned him $1 million if you include the $400,000 movie rights. . . . It got him on the cover of Time magazine. He was on there again in 1982 when Rabbit Is Rich won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Ten years later he published a sequel and they gave him another Pulitzer for it (only the third American to ever win it twice). Then a PEN/Faulkner Award after that and he got a Guggenheim too at some point. He appeared multiple times on Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose and he was the subject of documentaries and biographies and critical anthologies and an academic periodical that endures to this day.

“He died in 2009.

“And then everyone stopped reading him.

“I think they’ll start again,” Sorondo wrote.

Read the rest of his 16-part essay

Writer says Updike changed his literary life

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William J. Donahue just published a piece on his blog that first appeared in the fall/winter 2024 edition of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal as part of a feature story about John Updike, who was born in adjacent Berks County.

In “The Writer Who Changed Me More Than Any Other,” Donahue wrote, “Prior to the summer of 2009, the name John Updike meant almost nothing to me. All I knew was that he belonged to a certain class of writer—white, male, and, as of January 27 of that year, dead.”

“Everything changed when a college professor friend introduced me to one of Updike’s best-known short stories, ‘A&P,'” he wrote. “A coming-of-age story about herring snacks, Queenie’s scandalously bare shoulders, and Sammy’s gesture of occupational seppuku, ‘A&P’ opened my eyes to something new. It also compelled me to explore Updike’s short-story collections, followed by his longer works: the Rabbit novels, Couples, Of the Farm, Marry Me, S., A Month of Sundays, etc. His novel-slash-collection The Maples Stories, which catalogs the adolescence, life, death, and afterlife of a specific New England couple’s marriage, had the greatest impact on me.

“Like his other novels, Maples features rich prose that reminds me of a well-crafted poem. The story follows Joan and Richard Maple, imperfect spouses who struggle and persevere, expand and contract, destroy themselves, and then find their respective paths to post-divorce reinvention. As someone who spent much of his thirties wrestling with his own personal and professional bugbears, I found Maples inspiring, if not prescriptive.”

Read the whole article

Updike’s early unpublished novel may soon lose the ‘un’

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Trevor Meek, of The Local News (Ipswich, Mass.), published a Jan. 31, 2026 piece on the Selected Letters of John Updike that began,

“Living in Ipswich in the 1960s and ’70s with John Updike as a neighbor meant playing a high-stakes game of literary roulette. “On any given day, you might crack open his newest novel or short story to discover you’d been immortalized — or perhaps skewered — on a page destined to be read by millions around the world. “That uneasy thrill returned for some folks late last year with the release of Selected Letters of John Updike.

“’Even with this book, various people are looking through it to see if they’re mentioned,’ said Updike’s son, Michael, a sculptor. “’And then when they realize they are mentioned, they’re insulted,’ he added with a laugh.”

Michael Updike, heavily quoted in the article, defended his father against one of the most common charges. “He seems to be an author who is judged as a misogynist because some of his characters are selfish. . . . We don’t say Nabokov is a pedophile because his character Humbert Humbert is one in Lolita.”

Michael Updike told The Local News that he’s working on the release of his father’s unpublished novel, Home. “We’re still figuring out how to get that rolling,” he said.

We asked Michael (pictured) for more details, and here’s what he had to say:

“Chris Carduff [who edited several of Updike’s Library of America volumes] gave us the idea, saying it was a completed novel albeit rejected by a publishing house. Jim Schiff [editor of the Selected Letters] has read it and says it’s not a perfect novel but does have a lot of new material about my grandmother in it. Andrew Wylie has been sent a copy and he thinks it should be published. So much of it is hand written, and our first step is to find a good typist who will type it up in Word. Then an editor to comb out any redundant or rough spots, and Wiley will shop it around. No timeline, but hopefully soon, by publishing terms—two or three years.”

Updike didn’t talk much about Home with interviewers, but he did tell Eric Rhode in 1969, ” I had written, prior to [The Poorhouse Fair], while living in New York City, a 600-page novel, called, I think, Home, and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of 16 or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel.”

If Home is as heavily autobiographical as Updike suggests, perhaps it will be read and appreciated as a companion to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989).

Book reviewer references Updike and Roth

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Andrew Gelman, in reviewing The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers for The Future of Statistical Modeling (Substack), relies on John Updike and Philip Roth for a core comparison:

“Going back a bit in literary time, The Ten Year Affair is a lot like the novels of John Updike: various suburban married couples having affairs. The writing style is different–Updike is famously lyrical, whereas Somers uses a Millennial flat writing style: This happens, then This happens, then That happens, etc. Kind of like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver if they had a sense of humor.

“I think Somers does a much better job than Updike in conveying what it feels like to be a parent. To me, Updike, like Philip Roth, was to the end of his life always a son, never a father. Updike did have four kids, but I guess his wife did most of the parenting. Updike’s characters often have children but always seem to be thinking only about themselves. Not so much that his adult characters are self-centered–I mean, yeah, they are, but that’s kind of the point–but more that their children don’t seem to exist at all, except to the extent that they sometimes have to be dealt with as obstacles when they get in the way of the parents. In contrast, the adults in The Ten Year Affair are very aware of their kids. In some ways this is similar to Little Children by Tom Perotta, a book whose entire theme is that these adults are thinking only of themselves and are not shouldering the responsibilities of parenthood.”

Read the whole article

Is reading Updike, even ‘Golf Dreams,’ an ‘act of rebellion’?

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From The Falling Knife by Harvey Sawikin (Substack):

“The critic Ted Gioia recently posted a Substack called Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased? He noted that among those being forgotten are literary giants like John Cheever and Saul Bellow; musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker; and movies like Citizen Kane. John Updike not long ago was one of America’s most prominent living writers, yet reading him today would be, in Gioia’s words, ‘an act of rebellion.’

“Call me a wild-eyed revolutionary, because I’ve just finished a book of Updike’s essays, Golf Dreams. I’ve been reading his novels since I was a teenager, starting with The Centaur, moving on to Rabbit, Run (which I was too young to understand), and over the decades getting to most of the others (Rabbit Is Rich is my favorite). Updike could write anything — novels, stories, poetry, essays — and bring to it his gift for the exquisite image and the revealing metaphor, as well as his insight into human psychology.”

Read the entire article

Blogger shares favorite Updike story

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OnJan. 3, 2026, Patrick Kurp posted comments on his favorite Updike story on Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life: “The Happiest I’ve Been.”

“Of all Updike’s stories, this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It’s the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. For most of us, happiness is a momentary state, not perpetual.”

Kurp added, “Of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Nabokov writes:

“‘The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

Read the whole post

Ipswich columnist asks if Updike would be published today

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Bob Waite, whose father was Updike’s dentist back when the author lived and worked in Ipswich, has been a columnist for North Shore media for decades. Recently he wrote an opinion piece that was published by The Local News, “Lite Waite: Could John Updike, a Straight White Male, Find a Home in Today’s Literary Scene?”

It’s a fair question, but readers probably already know the answer. In fact, John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was watching the new BBC miniseries Down Cemetery Road when she saw this allusion to Updike that perfectly captures the current situation (and provided these screenshots):

After Updike published his scandalous wife-swapping novel Couples in 1968, the attention the book brought elevated him to the role of spokesperson for America’s changing morality that deviated sharply from the staid 1950s. It’s no surprise then, that Updike would also become a lightning rod for criticism of male novelists during the era of “#Me Too.”

“There is no shortage of millennial white males who believe themselves shut out of a contemporary literary scene that seems curated by, and targeted at, women,” Waite wrote. “By implication, Updike would suffer a similar fate. To elaborate, Waite cites Ross Barkan (“From Misogyny to No Man’s Land”): “If men still sit at the top of publishing houses, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note.” Barkan argues that straight white males have all but disappeared as authors and literary characters. Waite wrote, “He tells us that ‘between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations).'” Continue reading →

Writer David Klion recommends Updike’s Bech chronicles

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“‘[Henry Bech’s] marriage was like the Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where there was no safety,’ Updike writes, sizing up Israel better than Bellow ever did through the eyes of a Jew who is accustomed to living in a permanent state of alienation. Reviewing the first Bech volume in Commentary in 1970, Cynthia Ozick accused Updike of dreaming up a false and essentially parodic Jew—but this Jew, for one, found Bech welcome and familiar company.”

So wrote David Klion, who is working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism and is a columnist for The Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and a “writer for many lefty mags.” His review/reading recommendation on The Complete Henry Bech appeared in the Sept. 5, 2025 issue of Jewish Currents under the heading, “Shabbat Reading List.” For those planning on attending the Roth-Updike Conference in New York City October 19-22—a joint conference of the Philip Roth and John Updike Societies—the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

“If the Bech stories were merely affectionate sendups of Roth or experiments in whether a goy can channel a Jew persuasively in fiction,” Klion wrote, “they might just be amusing—and for my purposes, dayeinu. But I became fully invested in Bech as a cranky, horny, self-absorbed, self-effacing, skeptical, and occasionally wise antihero, rendered through Updike’s always lyrical prose. Taken together, the stories constitute an extended comic meditation on bookish fame (or semi-fame), inspiration (or lack thereof), and frustration, complete with a fake bibliography and fake reviews from the likes of Alfred Kazin and Ellen Willis.”

Read the whole review.