Category Archives: First Person Singular

Podcast dives deep into Updike’s ‘Rich in Russia’

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Book Odyssey, a he-said/she-said podcast with 649 subscribers, posted a discussion of John Updike’s short story “Rich in Russia” on July 26, 2026. At the time of this writing the episode had zero likes or dislikes, but, their inexplicable mispronunciation of Updike’s Jewish alter ego as “Besh” aside, it deserves more followers. These literary explorers are entertaining and thought-provoking to listen to as they discuss Updike’s story in great detail and contexts that listeners can perhaps identify with: fish-out-of-water travel experiences, imposter syndrome, social obligations, etc. Or, as they put it, “This deep dive explores John Updike’s brilliant literary satire, where travel becomes a mirror reflecting the contradictions of politics, culture, and the creative mind.”

The podcast’s stated “Key Takeaways”:
—Follow Henry Bech’s unusual journey through Cold War Russia and Romania
—Explore the struggles of a writer searching for meaning and inspiration
—Examine the difficulties of cultural exchange across political boundaries
—Discover Updike’s clever use of metafiction and fictional autobiography
—Analyze themes of identity, creativity, isolation, and artistic ambition

“Rich in Russia” was first published in the January 31,1970 issue of The New Yorker and included as a chapter in Bech: A Book, published later that same year.

 

 

Here’s the link

One panelist shares remarks from 2025 Roth-Updike Roundtable

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In October 2025 the John Updike and Philip Roth societies jointly sponsored a conference in New York City. The opening session, “Roth-Updike Intersections: A Roundtable Discussion,” featured Sylvie Mathé, D. Quentin Miller, James Schiff, and Matthew Shipe. Mathé’s remarks are available online now from HAL open science.

Here is the link to a downloadable PDF

Indian scholar shares Updike photos

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Charter John Updike Society member Pradipta Sengupta passed along three photos from Prof. Sukhbir Singh, one of the senior professors of American literature in India who retired from Osmania University some ten years ago.

“He had taken interviews with Updike and Saul Bellow, and those interviews were published in the SPAN [a U.S. Embassy New Delhi publication]. So far as I can recall, the Updike interview was published around September/October 1997. Prof. Singh has sent me these three photos of John Updike taken in the Beverly Farms house during this interview (possibly taken in 1995). Updike had taken him on a tour of his house and its surroundings, bordering on the Massachusetts Bay. Singh has requested me to send these photos to share in the Updike newsletter (blog).” Thank you Prof. Singh for sharing these photos, which illustrate how accommodating Updike was with scholars—especially those outside the U.S.

 

Author: Updike’s Rabbit captured a tipping point in U.S. history

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In “The First Frames of America’s Slow Fade: John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels,” written for The PineBelt News, Mik Davis began, “A key part of American Literature is to frame the common experience of life with the common aspects of culture. Following the destruction of Europe during WWII, the consumerist culture of America was a key component in our ascension to the world’s dominant superpower. It was not merely having everything that had taken root during previous rings of evolution all at once. It was the combination of societal change, technology, and the expansion of cities, workplaces and culture. It is fitting that not all of this rapid growth can impact everyone. In purely Darwinian terms, someone or something must be left behind.”

One such someone was Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who, “like Reading, peaked too soon.” Davis argued, “The work of Updike is not meant to be satirical although it does seek to mirror societal change and honestly weather the alteration and abandonment of social mores. However, it is the friction of two worlds in motion that sets him apart from other writers. To  most, the events that set televisions aglow or the songs on the radio are a mood setter. To Updike, they are the changing frames around the portrait of a family and the community in decline. Not crisis. However, one might say the crisis around the family may be the factor that changes those frames over time from a gilded gold-leaf ornate locally-forged metal to a simple hand-painted orange/red wood where the grain shows through and perhaps the knots as well.”

Teacher talks of being starstruck, and falling stars

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In a brief humorous piece that reads like a cocktail party anecdote, Dianne Mcknight-Warren shared “How Dinner With John Updike Ruined My Teaching Career.” 

“When I was in graduate school, I’d lived in the same town as Updike. He had movie star status, but I never saw him. I worked in a restaurant where he drank a Heineken once at the bar and the bartender got his autograph for me: ‘For Diane who waitresses and teaches all at once–John updike.’ And one night when I wasn’t working he came in for dinner and the manager saved me the carbon from his American Express. I could see his signature if I held it up to a light.”

Read the rest of the story about her 1989 Christmas Eve dinner.

Millennials advised to read John Updike

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In “No One Reads John Updike—And Why Millennial Americans Should,” Tom Vondriska writes with the kind of persuasive flourish that is appropriate to an essay about America’s great stylist of the last half of the 20th century.

Contemplating America’s 250th anniversary, Vondriska writes that “only the superannuated medium of the novel can do proper justice to national self reflection. By slowing it down. Moby Dick, Walden (a novel in feel, if not content), Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and On the Road timestamp America across decades and centuries. The time period most resonant for extant Americans in 2026—that is, the decades after the war—has a single literary protagonist whose life traces the arc of the American century and whose story reveals how this country dealt with finding itself at the center of the world. His name is Harry Angstrom and he was created by John Updike, who called him Rabbit.

“No one reads John Updike in 2026” because “Updike does not fit in a basket Americans feel comfortable, in 2026, peering into. His writing is not didactic. There is no moral in tow. His characters are not progressive for the time he writes in (1950-1990, mostly) and certainly not for the present day. He does not rely on postmodern hijinks and stupid tricks to keep the reader engaged. There are no meta-textual, show-offy pyrotechnics.The author does not seek to confuse the readers or make them feel stupid. The characters are not created to be redeemed and if they grow or change, this is incidental. The characters are not created to be liked. There are no wizards, or time travel, or vampires, no strange inter-textual monkey business with trippy dreamlike surrealism transporting the reader to some altered state of confabulated vertigo. But the writing is simply the most flawless prose in the English language in the 20th century. The characters are set loose in the real world, in America, and make their way. The most famous of Updike’s creations and the one whose life tells the greatest literary story about post-1945 America is Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom”

Read the entire essay.

Author: Updike anticipated the MAGA movement

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On July 3, 2026, Rashmee Roshan Lall mentioned Updike in This Week, Those Books, which aims to provide “in roughly five minutes, crucial context—from fiction and non-fiction—to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.” The “Big Story” this week was, of course, America’s 250th birthday. Of Updike, Lall writes,

“Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Choice Quote (from Rabbit Redux): “It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Read the whole post.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, gossip in an era of cell phones and social media? Read the entire article.

Jackson also wrote a piece for Literary Hub (“Jenny Jackson on the Literary Potential of Gossip”) in which she identified a second , “The second inspiration for The Shampoo Effect came from a less literary (but equally Massachusetts) fixation. In 2007, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady famously had a baby with the actress Bridget Moynahan while dating the supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Brady and Bridget Moynahan were no longer together, and he was with Gisele by the time Bridget realized she was pregnant. It was a tabloid sensation, a love triangle that paid salaries across Us Weekly and Page Six. So, these two gossipy scandals tangled together in my mind to become a novel.” Read the entire article.

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

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Thomas Bevilacqua, a Ph.D. who teaches high school English at The Maclay School in Florida, recently posted his reaction to John Updike’s Roger’s Version on his Substack blog:

“It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment . . . while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment,” Bevilacqua wrote.

The problem, for Bevilacqua, was Updike’s “engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central. . . . The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered by how it feels . . . dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.”

Bevilacqua concluded, “Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.”

If that compulsion holds, perhaps Bevilacqua might try the other two novels in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which Updike updated and retold Hawthorne’s story of an adulterous triangle from perspective of each of the main characters, starting with the Dimmesdale character (A Month of Sundays, 1975) and ending with the Hester character (S., 1988), with the voyeuristic Roger’s Version falling in the middle (1986).

Blogger reconsiders ‘Rabbit Redux’

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In a brief post on Books, Inq., a Blogspot blog, Jesse Freedman wrote, “I didn’t think too much — as I recall — of Rabbit, Run, but now, having returned to Updike, and having finished Rabbit Redux, let me take that all back: at his prime, Updike packed a serious punch.”

But Freedman took exception with the way the book had been marketed, especially a quote from the Sunday Times that appeared on the back cover of the British edition of Redux.

“That quotation attempts to sell Updike’s vision as one in which he ‘transfigures the commonplace’ into something ‘beautiful.’ Let’s stop there: I don’t read Rabbit Redux in that way at all. In fact, I understand the novel as attempting to assert the opposite: namely that there’s an unbearable banality to the commonplace, and that boredom and sexuality are what propel the suburban experience in America. Rabbit Redux is less a celebration of the average, the mediocre, and far more an evaluation of the ways they persist, of how they interact. There’s lots of intercourse in Updike’s world, but much of it is pained; rarely is it ecstatic — as you might expect from a marketing quotation like the one on the Penguin edition. Rabbit Redux, despite the sales pitch, really is a triumph: a sorrowful, hip, urgent novel composed at the intersection of many worlds: those racial, those violent, those political. The book is a reminder that even the most common moments are subject to external factors, and that while sex may bring two people together, it is rarely enough for them to truly communicate.”