Category Archives: First Person Singular

What’s Keillor reading? Updike, of course

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The John Updike Society invited Garrison Keillor to be the keynote speaker at the Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, South Carolina last October because of his love of John Updike. So there won’t be much suspense for Updike fans when Martha’s Vineyard Times interviewer Connie Berry asks Keillor, “Whom do you like to read these days?”

“I am still reading John Updike,” says Keillor. “It will take me about five more years to finish with him. And then I’ll turn to Faulkner and Turgenev and go back and reread War and Peace, and then if I’m still alive I’ll take another run at Moby-Dick.”

Read the full interview:  “Minnesota invades Martha’s Vineyard”

New member’s thoughts on Toward the End of Time’s timeliness

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Ed Phillips, a polyolefin specialist by profession and the most recent member to join The John Updike Society, says he reread John Updike’s Toward the End of Time and “realized how more timely it is today compared to when it was released in 1997.”

At least in America, Phillps writes, “1997 was a relatively calm year” that was “way pre-9/11. Nobody had heard of al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden except the CIA. NEOCONS biding their time. Arguably the biggest story of 1997 was the death of Princess Diana . . . .

“Updike was 66 at the time, writing about 66-year-old Ben Turnbull, a comfortably retired wealth management manager living with his second wife in a seaside manse outside of Boston in the year 2020,” and Phillips, now 66 himself, decided it would be a good time to reread the novel . . . .

“It’s been 20 years, but I don’t recall it as one of Updike’s more memorable books. Normally for me his writing often blurs the line between extremely fine prose and poetry. I love gliding through his 150-word descriptive sentences. But the critics were not too fond of it either. One predicted that he had run out of juice. Thank goodness that wasn’t true. Maybe he was just intellectually exhausted from writing In the Beauty of the Lilies, perhaps his best work, just the year before. But Toward the End of Time was dark. An ineffectual Congress led by an incompetent President Smith had gotten the United States into a failed nuclear war with China. What a preposterous storyline! Vast areas have been seriously ‘de-populated.’ Our infrastructure and economy are badly damaged, travel between coasts is impossible, the dollar has been replaced with local emergency currency, script that is used to pay off entrepreneurs for basic services and security.

“Updike paints Turnbull as a man far past 66. I can say this being 66. Admittedly, though there are days when I feel much older. . . .

“No one can ‘observe’ like Updike. Read Just Looking (1989) or Still Looking (2005), Updike’s essays on art. They are works of art in themselves. But in Toward the End of Time, through Turnbull he describes every leaf and every petal and pistol and stamen in his wife’s gardens as they evolve and change texture and color and decay and smell over the course of four seasons. Almost as fillers, Updike throws in some golf talk and religious history and a few Vonnegutiann sci-fi elements.

“But Turnbull (Updike?) is also obsessed with sex, the act, in uncomfortable and incredibly graphic detail, fluids and all and has or recalls a lot of it throughout the book until of course he, Trumbull, being 66, becomes impotent and incontinent (again with the fluids) as a result of prostate surgery.

“Twenty years after its release, we are living in darker and certainly more uncertain times and the storyline doesn’t seem so preposterous now, and neither does the mood. Updike couldn’t possibly have foreseen the first 100 days of the Trump administration. But Toward the End of Time is far timelier now and should be given a second read. When Kellyanne Conway spoke the term “Alternative Facts” in a CNN interview, sales of Orwell’s 1984 shot up to #3 on the best seller list, with sales increasing by 10,000 percent. I think Toward the End of Time is far more relevant.

Joseph Epstein on Sex and Euphemism

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Open access online archives continue to spring up, and the latest Updike-related essay to become available is an essay written for the April 1, 1984 Commentary by Joseph Epstein. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s Joke or anything remotely Orwellian. “Sex and Euphemism” is a consideration of sex in western popular culture, and of course that means John Updike merits a mention.

“It is not always clear what the purposes of other novelists are in placing elaborately described bouts of sex in their novels. It might be kindest to say that they are, in manifold senses, just screwing around. But I think these writers rather desperately need sex in order to stay in business as writers. It isn’t that sex is all they know; it is merely that sex seems to be what they know best. To restrict myself to American novelists alone, I can think of three prominent figures who, but for the opportunity that the contemporary novel allows them to write about sex, would probably have to go into the dry-cleaning business: John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer,” Epstein writes.

“These three gents, to be sure, make quite different uses of sex in their novels. For John Updike sexual descriptions often provide an opportunity for a metaphor-soaked, lyrical workout; exceptions are the frequent sexual paces Updike puts his character Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom through, when it becomes lower-middle-class sex, plain-spoken and snarly and nasty. Philip Roth plays the sex in his novels chiefly for laughs, but play it he does, over and over and over. But whereas Up-dike can be by turns pretentious and repellent, and Roth depressing while trying for humor, Norman Mailer, in his handling of the sexual subject, is unconsciously comic (not, I hasten to add, that reading him is likely to cheer anyone up). Sex almost always provides the big moments in Norman Mailer’s novels; in these novels, sex, somehow, is always a challenge, a chance for triumph, an over the hill, boys, walk on the moon bullfight, though when it is over what one mostly remembers is the bull. Quotations on request.”

Epstein concludes, “Suffice it to say that in contemporary writing about sex, we are not talking, and haven’t been for some years, about your simple Sunday afternoon fornication. Not only must sex in the contemporary novel grow more regular but it must become more rococo. Thus Updike presents us with an activity known euphemistically as California sunshine; Roth in his most recent novel has a woman whose purse contains a “nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K.Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope”; Mailer, relying on fundamentals, concentrates on heterosexual sodomy. Ah, the literary life.”

Read the full article.

Of Hub Fans, Red Sox Nation, and the Chicago Cubs

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Christopher Borrelli‘s Chicago Tribune think piece on “Building a baseball story: 7 lessons Red Sox can teach Cubs” invokes that most famous of sports stories, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which Borrelli calls “a kind of gospel of the Red Sox, as hallowed as a prayer in New England,” written, of course, by John Updike.

“Like the New Englander he became, Updike romanticized the Red Sox, both ups and downs.

“He fed the narrative,” Borrelli writes, offering ideas on how the Chicago Cubs can “serve its narrative and wrangle its history, broaden its reach and nurture its relationship with fans” and it involves the celebration of pop culture’s baseball embrace. He recalls one saturated moment in Boston:

“Driving to Fenway from the diner, I flipped through the radio: On a sports station, a former Red Sox player was telling stories about how former manager Terry Francona would sit naked on the toilet during meetings in his office. Someone on local NPR was reading from Updike’s classic. On music stations, songs about the Red Sox, songs that have become synonymous with Fenway, ‘Dirty Water’ and ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘As We Walk to Fenway Park in Boston Town.’ A Budweiser commercial has a bro doing a bad Boston accent, giving an opening-day rally speech that makes no sense in 2017: ‘We’re Boston! We’re not supposed to win!”

Part of that pop-cultural narrative includes the story of how Theo Epstein and the team’s new management “slapped Updike’s words on that wall, alongside the water cooler” to inspire players.  He might as well have broken into a chorus of Fiddler on the Roof‘s “Tradition”. . . .

Rabbit, as viewed by the left wing of the AltRight

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Altleft.com, which bills itself tongue-in-cheek as “The left wing of the AltRight,” recently posted a piece by Brandon Adamson titled “An Aversion to Quagmires—A Collective Desertion Toward Our Future.” Though it’s not all about Rabbit, Harry does turn up in a discussion of “Beatnik Fascism”:

“The more idiosyncratic identitarians like myself lead extremely detached lives,” Adamson writes. “Most of us seek a kind of escape from what passes for everyday life for most people. . . .”

“John Updike once claimed in an interview with Penguin Classics that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Updike said:

“Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; “Rabbit,Run” was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.

“Yet, despite Updike’s intentions, while reading Rabbit, Run as a young man, I identified much more with the character of Rabbit. Sure, the people he leaves behind do get hurt, but it didn’t appear to me to be any huge loss for the world. After all, his wife was an alcoholic that made him miserable, and his girlfriend was a prostitute, not exactly the type of people you’d feel like he owes some huge commitment to. There are his young children of course (one of which dies as a result of a careless accident committed by the drunken wife). Yet, Rabbit would have been unable to prevent this even if he hadn’t ran out. It would have probably happened anyway while he was busy at work one day, in his totally meaningless sales job that Updike implies should ahve been his duty to remain at. Rabbit meanwhile points out the hypocrisy in all the people who attempt to tell him how to live. ‘Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.’ This is the problem with Updike’s world. He frowns upon the runners, reformers and rockers of the boat for what he perceives as the messes left behind and the plight of the abandoned, the weakening of the church . . . etc., yet beneath the forced facade of cohesion which he insists is imperative that we maintain at all costs, those who look closely still see an outline of the same puddle of puke, obscured only by having been swept partially under the rug.”

Read the entire article.

Writer thinks Rabbit, Run a mock heroic tale

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The Guardian posted an April 21, 2017 opinion piece by Sarah Churchwell in the books section titled “John Updike’s Rabbit, Run—another American story of men escaping women,” with the pull-out quote “US culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free—by Updike’s time, all that was left was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy.”

In a sense, Churchwell writes, “Rabbit, Run is a clever subversion of an old US motif: the man on the run from the suffocating effects of society, as if a tragicomic western had lost its way and ended up trapped in southeastern Pennsylvania. But this tradition is also endlessly troped as men escaping the domestic snares of women, a tradition which Rabbit, Run cheerily joins. From Huck Finn lighting west for the Territory to escape Aunt Polly’s efforts to ‘sivilize’ him, to Charles Ingalls, with his itch for travel and his wife who insists they build a little house on the prairie for their girls, to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty taking off on the road: US popular culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free, and the women who yearn only for them not to be. These are doubtless very enjoyable stories for men to read, but for women they can be quite irksome. Always cast as the smothering presence, the old ball-and-chain pinning men down who would otherwise roam wild, women end up symbolising dependence and paralysis while men get to symbolise independence and liberty. I know which one I prefer.”

Churchwell writes, “But by 1960, there was nowhere to run: the frontier was well and truly closed, and all that was left for men was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy, running in circles.

“Part of the problem for women reading Rabbit, Run is that Updike made the decision to have Harry choose between two stereotypes: after returning home Harry leaves Janice again, this time moving in with a prostitute. Janice, the asexual mother, is small, childish, bony; the prostitute Ruth is voluptuous, large, welcoming, and fecund. . . . Either way, to judge it against a modern metric, it’s fair to say Rabbit, Run fails the Bechdel test (requiring that two or more female characters discuss a topic other than men.”

Read the full article.

Maverick Philospher considers John Updike’s Christianity

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The Maverick Philosopher blog recently responded to Gerald R. McDermott’s “‘A Rather Antinomian Christianity’: John Updike’s Religion,” which was posted March 13, 2015 on The Witherspoon Institute website, Public Discourse. 

Highlighting McDermott’s assertions that “Updike ‘radically divorced’ Christian theology from Christian ethics,” that “Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage,” and “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted,” Maverick Philosopher writes,

“We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was it’s slave. But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case. Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit Is Rich in the early ’90s.

“As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in. It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion.

Read the entire response: “John Updike’s Christianity.”

Literary Hub includes Updike in birth control “history”

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Ellen Feldman offers “A Brief Literary History of Birth Control from George Orwell and John Updike to Grace Metalious and Alice Munro” in an article posted 23 March 2017 at Literary Hub. The entry on Updike credits Rabbit, Run as a touchstone:

“Rabbit Angstrom of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, has an aversion to contraception, but unlike Orwell’s character, he objects to it on physical and aesthetic rather than political grounds. When Ruth Leonard, the ‘hooer’ to whom he’s giving fifteen dollars ‘toward [her] rent,’ is about to slip into the bathroom to insert what he calls a ‘flying saucer,’ he stops her with the argument that he’s ‘very sensitive.’ ‘Do you have the answer then?’ she asks. ‘No, I hate them even worse…If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this,’ Rabbit, who has abandoned his pregnant wife and child, goes on, ‘give me the fifteen back.’

Couples is also cited:  “Eight years after the publication of Rabbit, Run, Updike not only espoused birth control but also identified it by brand name. The first time Piet and Georgene, married to other people, have sex, he worries about ‘making a little baby,” and she’s surprised he doesn’t know about Enovid. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ she tells him, and the ‘light-hearted blasphemy . . . immensely relieved him.'”

With only nine entries you’d have to call it a very brief history, but it’s still a fascinating round-up.

Liberty Conservative takeaways from The Coup

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On March 17, 2017, Larsen Halleck shared his thoughts about John Updike’s satirical novel, The Coup, for The Liberty Conservative—another political consideration of an author who, in his lifetime, was often criticized for not being political enough.

“In his life,” Halleck begins, “John Updike was considered to be one of, if not the, premier American novelists of the 20th century—his Rabbit Angstrom books are still considered to be one of the best satires of the archetypal downtrodden American husband and father (the genre arguably started by Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit), full of broken dreams and mediocrity as he struggles against the changes of the world around him.

“But that’s not what I’ve come here to discuss:

“My favorite of his works is the 1978 best seller The Coup, an excellent read in its own right, but so much more than that: For The Coup is quite possibly the only satire of post-colonial Africa (or at least, the only one I’m aware of). More to the point, in satirizing latter 20th-century Marxist states, The Coup shines a light on some aspects of modern leftist ideology that confuse and infuriate us today, and shows that even back then there were competing camps in the leftist ‘big tent.’ And of course, there is an implicit message of ‘Imperialism will hurt the empire in the long run,’ which is most relevant to America in its current decline.”

Read the full article.

Rabbit at Rest, Updike remembered

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Today John Updike (1932-2009) would have celebrated his 85th birthday, and notable among the remembrances published in commemoration is one by Steve King, written, fittingly, for a books site:  Barnes & Noble.

In “Something Intricate and Fierce,” King begins with a quote from Updike and follows with this quote from reviewer Jonathan Raban:  “Rabbit at Rest is one of the very few modern novels in English . . . that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.”

Birthday tributes are a testament to Updike’s cultural importance, but King’s post illustrates something that would make Updike smile if he were still around to blow out the candles:  that he has political relevance, something that in his lifetime, ironically, critics never appreciated.

“Whatever Updike’s own politics—biographer Begley notes that Updike on his deathbed rejoiced at President Obama’s inauguration—some commentators say that Updike lives on as spokesman for embattled Middle Americans, whose current angst and anger he saw coming.” And King concludes with a quote from Charles McElwee, written for The American Conservative magazine:  “‘Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism—in the form of Donald Trump—prevailed on Election Day 2016.”

Updike—and irony—are still very much alive.

Happy 85th, Mr. Updike!