Category Archives: First Person Singular

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

Posted on by
Reply

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’

Posted on by
Reply

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’

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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

Updike, Irwin Shaw, P.K. Dick, and Joan Maple?

Posted on by
Reply

In a recent blog-post musing, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, talked about picking up a copy of the LOA two-volume set of Updike’s Collected Stories and reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Which led him to recall a similarly titled story by Irwin Shaw, “Main Currents of American Thought,” which led him (come on, keep up!) to think that rather than having anything in common with Shaw, “Updike is similar to Philip K. Dick as a writer in that he takes the same few characters and recycles them through lots of similar situations.

“Dick has the pathetic lead character (‘Joe Chip’), the reliable older man (‘Runciter’), and the nagging wife (the sister in Confessions of a Crap Artist). Updike has the ‘Updike’ character (a student or young man in the early stories, then a young husband and father, then a divorcing middle-aged man, then a rueful man in late middle age, drifting among his own thoughts) along with various supporting characters.”

Which leads Gelman, finally, to, “I like lots of individual Updike stories but I’ve gotta say that the best are the Maples stories because these are the only ones where the woman character is as strong as the man. Joan gives as good as she gets.” Then back again to “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

Read the whole post

Rabbit still runs in Pennsylvania

Posted on by
Reply

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’

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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