Category Archives: First Person Singular

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.

Updike is referenced in a book of Mark Twain poems

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John Updike Society president James Plath spent two weeks as a fall 2023 Quarry Farm Fellow working on an essay detailing how Twain modeled being a celebrity writer for both Hemingway and Updike. Plath conducted that research, but also felt compelled to write poems about the house and its inhabitants. Not surprisingly, Updike found his way into one of the poems:

Carved Stone Troughs

John Updike saw himself in a dogwood tree
his parents planted the year he turned one.
Parents do such things. Twain’s jeu d’esprit
led him to place four troughs in part-sun

along the Farm on East Hill road, so spaced
to revive tired horses, and with their carvings mark
the birth of four Clemens—who may have raced
later to see whose was used, while dogs would bark.

But when three of four children die before the father,
those troughs become hollowed-out markers that bear
the burden of emptiness, not crosses to inspire prayer
or reflection. It’s a wonder that Twain continued to care,

funneling stone-cold grief into sage
satire, instead of yielding to alcohol and rage.

At Quarry Farm was published in June 2025 by Kelsay Books and is available from the publisher and Amazon. Society members wanting a copy and who also plan on attending the Roth-Updike Conference in NYC in October can email Plath (jplath@iwu.edu) to bring a copy there to save postage.

Psychology professor offers unique take on Vidal, Updike, and masculinity

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Sometimes the most interesting takes on an author come from great thinkers outside the field of literature. Such is the case with an article by Kali DuBois that was published in Medium: “What If Gore Vidal and John Updike Had a Lovechild? Why Chop Dog-Eared These Pages Like a Hungry Man on a Cheeseburger Vagina.” 

“Gore Vidal and John Updike reshaped what it meant to be a man in America—and they did it from opposite ends of the battlefield,” wrote DuBois, who holds a Master’s degree in human sexuality and certifications in biological psychology, biofeedback, kinesiology, neuro-semantics, tantra, yoga, mind codes, and martial arts.

“Gore Vidal taught men that the personal was political, and that sex was never just about pleasure but about power. He forced men to see hypocrisy in the mirror, questioning the structures they benefitted from while often feeling trapped within them. He mocked American masculinity — its obsession with conquest, its fear of vulnerability, its addiction to empire — and invited men to see themselves not as rulers of the world but as products of it,” DuBois wrote.

“Vidal’s men were sharp, politically aware, often bisexual or morally fluid, understanding that identity was both a performance and a prison. He planted in men’s minds the belief that if you weren’t willing to challenge the system, you were part of it — and if you wanted freedom, you had to face uncomfortable truths about who you were, what you desired, and what you were complicit in.

“John Updike, meanwhile, told men it was okay to feel.

“His men were confused, lustful, terrified of aging, perpetually restless in their marriages, and looking for transcendence in the bodies of women they often did not deserve. Updike gave men permission to see their boredom, their longing, their sexual frustrations, not as shameful failings, but as a fundamental part of being alive.

“But he also left men with the belief that their inner turmoil was something the world should revolve around, that their dissatisfaction was profound, and that the search for pleasure and meaning in the domestic was a noble, if doomed, quest.

“Between them, these two men planted conflicting beliefs into American men:

  • That sex is power (Vidal) and sex is salvation (Updike).
  • That politics is personal (Vidal) and personal suffering is political enough (Updike).
  • That masculinity is a performance to be deconstructed (Vidal) and masculinity is a tragic inheritance to be endured (Updike).

Men who read Vidal learned to distrust the system. Men who read Updike learned to distrust themselves. Together, they created a generation of men who wanted to be both aware and desired, critical and romantic, cynical and yearning.

Read the whole article.

Writer-musician thinks Updike ‘underpraised’

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We just discovered a blog entry by music journalist, musician, and street photographer Ted Burke: “John Updike’s Underpraised Genius” (posted May 10, 2024), in which Burke argued that “what the departed Updike leaves behind is one of the most impressive bodies of work a contemporary writer, American or otherwise, would want for a legacy.

“His Rabbit quartet of novels . . . is among the peerless accomplishments of 20th century fiction in its chronicle of living through the confusion of the Viet Nam war, feminism, civil rights and the sexual revolution in the person of the series’ titular character, Rabbit Angstrom. Not deep of thought but rich in resentment, Angstrom was an analog of American culture itself, a congested vein of self-seeking that never recovered from the raw sensation of youthful vigor; Angstrom, like the country itself, resentfully fumbled about for years ruing the loss of vitality and trying to replace it with new things, the crabby possessiveness of the middle class.”

Burke concluded, “If a writer’s task is, among others, to help us understand the actions that cause us to fall down and act badly despite our best intentions, Updike has performed a patriotic service. There should be some prize for that.”

Actually, there was. For his contributions to American culture, in two separate White House ceremonies Updike received the National Medal of Arts from Pres. George H.W. Bush in 1989 and the National Humanities Medal from Pres. George W. Bush in 2003.

Read Burke’s full post.

British writer uses Updike to intro a piece on booksigning

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British novelist and short story writer William Boyd wrote a piece for The Spectator on a curious consequence of literary fame—mass booksignings—that began with an anecdote about John Updike:

“The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike’s novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies – guaranteed sales, of course, hard to refuse. They sweetened the pill by flying him to a Caribbean island for a couple of weeks and putting him up in a beachside bungalow. There, a team of assistants brought him 100 books at a time and he would sign away, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Updike was very droll about the discombobulating effects of signing your own name thousands upon thousands of times. It became an almost existential crisis. His signature became illegible; he began to wonder who this person ‘John Updike’ was and what relation he had to the automaton signing his name day after day.
“I feel I know something of what he went through. My publishers asked me to sign 6,000 so-called tip-in pages for the hardback of my new novel, The Predicament, that would be inserted into the book for an exclusive signed edition. No Caribbean island, alas.”
Read the whole article.

Updike’s American Everyman is referenced in a July 4 think piece

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It’s July 4 in the U.S., and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is once again in the news—or rather, a think piece. Warning: Though Harry leaned right, The Nation, in which this piece by Jeet Heer appears, leans left. One statistic, though, seems more personal than political, because the comparison year (2004) is one during which another Republican president, George W. Bush, was in office:

Currently, “Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.”

Heer had written, “Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

“Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: ‘Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he had been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Read the whole article. 

Killing time by chasing Updike

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Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the shelf. As it turns out, his diversion is the literary scholar’s method:

“Gearing up for the book of John Updike letters coming out in October I thought I’d once again travel through Adam Begley’s terrif Updike. Curiosity took me on a hunt when I came across this sentence on page 426:

“’A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his “heart and soul” into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been “recognized”.’

“It was the ‘…small public library in the Hudson Valley…’ that sent me scampering to Google. As I live in the Hudson Valley and am acquainted with a number of its libraries, I figured I’d be able to (hopefully!) quickly zero in on which library Updike visited. Researching the Peter Arno biography i wrote, I quickly learned things just don’t go as smoothly as you might think when on a fact-finding mission.

“The ‘Notes’ in Begley’s Updike biography indicate the ‘…small public library…’ passage was sourced from Updike’s Odd Jobs, page 761. I headed right to Odd Jobs, page 761, but the passage wasn’t there. Dead end. It happens (my biography of Peter Arno has its share of ‘issues.’). I briefly considered writing Mr. Begley, but decided that this was too small a ‘thing’ for him to be troubled with. A day or two went by. I tried to let the hunt go. Then, this afternoon, having worked on cartoons for hours, and in need of a break, I sat next to the Updike section of our bookshelves and thought for a moment. What if the page number 761 was correct, but the book title was off. I began looking through Updike’s various hefty collections, beginning with Higher Gossip: zip. Due Considerations: zip. More Matter…bingo! There, on page 761 is this from Updike’s ‘Me and My Books’ — it was originally published in The New Yorker, February 3, 1997:

“‘On one steel shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its own tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge near the library door…’

“I began thinking about the Hudson Valley libraries I was familiar with. None of them fit Updike’s description. So back to Google and to the list of libraries lining the Hudson Valley. Using Google maps (aerial view) I was able to easily see if any library was that close to water. I struck out with perhaps twenty or so libraries, when I saw this location in Marlboro, New York. And then using the street view, there it was, exactly as Updike described it: ‘tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge.’ This scene is directly across from the Gomez Mill House.

Updike and Wallace seem forever linked in writing debates

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In a June 9, 2025 piece published by The New Statesman, George Monaghan considered “The revenge of the young male novelist; Can good writing solve our crisis of masculinity?” 

Of course, John Updike came up, and so did a writer once influenced by him who later seemed to make a bigger name for himself by attacking him:  David Foster Wallace. The context: ego as it relates to writers.

“American novelist John Updike claimed not to write for ego: ‘I think of it more as innocence. A writer must be in some way innocent.’ We might raise an eyebrow at this, from the highly successful and famously intrusive chronicler of human closeness. Even David Foster Wallace, the totem effigy of literary chauvinism, denounced Updike as a ‘phallocrat.’ But if we doubt such innocence of Updike, pronouncing as he was at the flushest height of fiction’s postwar heyday, we might believe it of these new novelists, writing as they are and when they are. Without a promise of glory, and facing general skepticism, they have written from pure motives. They are novelists as Updike defined them: ‘only a reader who was so excited that he tried to imitate and give back the bliss that he enjoyed’.

“So it may be no bad thing if none of these novels quite fetches the reviews Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest did (‘the plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. … it’s as though Wittgenstein has gone on Jeopardy!’). These guys want to start a moment, not end one. They more want to write novels than be novelists. It is hard to say what relief these books might bring to a societal masculinity crisis, but in composing them their authors have displayed at least the two simple virtues Updike wanted to claim for himself: ‘a love of what is, and a wish to make a thing.'”

Read the entire article

Top five road-trip novels? Rabbit runs among them

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Photo credit: Ben Hasty – Reading Eagle

Benjamin Markovits was interviewed about “The Best Road Trip Novels” he selected for readers of the Five Books website:

1—On the Road by Jack Kerouac
2—Independence Day, by Richard Ford
3—Ladder of Years: A Novel, by Anne Tyler
4—Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
5—The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, by Peter Taylor

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike—the first in the series of novels featuring Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. I think of this as an archetypal midlife crisis novel. Do you agree?
Yeah. I mean, eventually. Although at the beginning he is only 26, although he is married with a kid, with another kid on the way. Midlife maybe began earlier then. He’s in a dead-end job. And, actually, I looked into the ‘midlife crisis’ term, and it was coined by a Canadian psychoanalyst who had in mind men in their mid-thirties. So he’s not so far off that.

Like Delia in Ladder of Years, he also leaves his family on a whim.
He’s determined to get the hell out of Dodge, and wants to drive to the coast although he never quite makes it because the tangle of American highways somehow obstructs him. He ends up moving one township away and shacking up with a woman that his old basketball coach introduced him to, and being no happier than he was before. He reproduces the same kind of domestic mess he was trying to escape from in the first place.

The road trip represents a common fantasy—that you can just get in your car and drive away, and never stop driving.
And we should talk about the car. I’ve done a couple of road trips across the States, and one of the things that happens is that the car becomes your home. It’s the only constant in your life. If you’re stopping in motels or camping or staying at friends’ houses, the car is the one place that you feel is consistent in your life.

The appeal of that in Rabbit, Run and all these other books is that in the car you have a home that you can take with you. You’re a turtle with a shell on your back.