Category Archives: First Person Singular

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.”

 

Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ makes list of books ‘That Capture This American Moment’

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Time magazine asked “25 literary luminaries to pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation’s history and beyond its borders . . . . a reading list to match this moment.”

Ron Chernow, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life and recently published a biography of Mark Twain, picked the second volume in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux:

“Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike’s extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Writer Ian McEwan and actor Cillian Murphy have called Updike’s collective Rabbit novels their choice for Great American Novel.

“25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” posted May 12, 2026

Journalist recalls an awkward encounter with Updike in Rome

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In addition to English, Rome-based freelance journalist Eric J. Lyman is fluent in Spanish and Italian. But words in any language seemed just shy of his reach when in spring, circa 2003-05, he “spotted John Updike having lunch near the Spanish Steps.

“He was seated at an outdoor table with a woman in her 50s. Short sandy hair, navy-blue blazer. She could have been his Italian publisher or agent. He wore a plaid coat and a pale tie. They were talking easily. Their plates were gone, but the water glasses were still on the table, along with a small, neat stack of books.”

Lyman said that as he approached them and considered a possible introductory line, “They both looked up before I could make a sound. And I suddenly froze, then turned, then disappeared around the corner.” More aborted attempts followed—an unusual thing to happen to a seasoned journalist. As Lyman wrote, “I don’t rattle easily. I’ve covered wars, jumped out of airplanes. I’ve interviewed presidents, been blessed by a pope, attended parties with Hollywood celebrities,” so this was new territory for him. But don’t feel too bad, Mr. Lyman. Despite your awkward encounter, at least you fared better than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Dick Diver, who, in Tender Is the Night, got into a drunken brawl with taxi drivers at the top of the Spanish Steps.

Read the whole essay, “The Writer Who Knew Too Much: A story about losing my nerve among the literary ghosts around the Spanish Steps,” posted on Lyman’s blog, The ITALIAN DISPATCH.

 

 

Was Updike anti-semitic or just mean spirited?

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Those who attended the joint Updike and Roth societies conference in Greenwich Village in October 2025 found two groups that, like their namesakes, were friendly rivals . . . mostly friendly. Only one person had an obvious axe to grind, which made members of both societies uncomfortable. And that person just published a well-written, thought-provoking article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Updike and the Jews.” Jesse Saich was reacting to Updike’s satirical Jewish alter-ego, Henry Bech, and the three volumes that allowed Updike to poke fun of the Jewish writers that he called the “chief glory” of postwar American fiction. Saich wondered,

“Why had Updike invented this de-Judaized Jew? ‘I find myself, in what should be an uncompetitive field, terribly jealous,’ Updike said in 1966. In a later interview, Updike was frank: All the attention paid to Jewish rivals annoyed him. ‘Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also.’ Reading the Bech stories, one senses another motive. ‘Your ideas are the product . . . of spite,’ a character tells Bech. ‘There is somebody you want to get even with.’ Bingo. Bech was a way of ‘working out various grudges,’ Updike confessed.”

But, as Saich admitted, “Even Updike’s detractors generally come around. ‘Long ago I wrote a nervous review of Bech for Commentary,’ Cynthia Ozick told Updike, offering apologies and congratulations (‘Mazel tov!’) on Updike’s Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, why not forgive? In every era, great writing springs from poisoned minds. Trollope disliked ‘low, disgusting Jews.’ Thackeray resented ‘sheenies.’ ‘What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.’ The author? None other than fair-minded George Orwell.

“A writer, Updike once said, is entitled to his bigotries. And so he was. Does that vitiate his art? Can we reject a novel’s morality but admire its beauty? I’ve always thought so, but now I’m not sure. On some level, reading entails submission to an author’s way of seeing. When we’re swept away, we become, for that moment, the author’s partner. In such complicity are the risks and rewards of great literature.”

Read the whole article