Author thinks Updike foresaw the Trump era

Posted on December 19, 2016 by James Plath

Writing for the American Conservative, Charles F. McElwee III asks, “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?”

“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,” he writes.

“Although Rabbit supported Humphrey in 1968, he later has a ‘Reagan Democrat’ conversion, voting for George H.W. Bush in the final novel. If anything, he’s the fictional embodiment of a political prototype, a cross-party coalition infuriated by the loss of what communities like Brewer once symbolized: economic prosperity and a shot at a stable middle-class American life. The Rabbit novels could serve as the fictional companion to any social-policy book by Charles Murray,” McElwee writes. “The realism of Updike’s characters and plot lines is a tribute to Updike’s understanding of this durable voting bloc, one that determined Hillary Clinton’s fate.”

Read the whole article.

Golf dreamers (and writers): a North Shore man remembers Updike

Posted on December 11, 2016 by James Plath

“I met John Updike in 1980, at a PEN/New England gathering,” recalled Dr. Steve Bergman, Professor of Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School. “I was shocked to see him–I’d never met a writer before. I overheard him telling Tim O’Brien the writer that he wanted to play golf that week and would Tim be interested? Tim said yes. They needed another for a foursome,and I introduced myself, and was accepted,” Bergman wrote on his blog, Samuel Shem: Conversation, Events & Book Talk. Shem is his pen name.

“Over the years, I would say we became best friends. Not that John would show much feeling, really, but I would often ask him to read something I was working on, and he’d talk about his work–and he used a character named Toby Bergman, editor of the local paper in Witches of Eastwick, who ‘breaks his leg’ (Bergman my real name) and in my next novel, The Spirit of the Place, there was, in return, one “Toby Updike, editor of the local paper, who breaks his leg.” Marvelous man.

Bergman concluded, “In a rough time, when he hadn’t heard from me in a while, he would always call–to talk about golf, or when we could next lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club (I was a member and they had a great buffet). He scheduled the next drop-off of a few cartons of his memorabilia at the Houghton Library just across the street, so it was convenient. I have this photo on my desk, of him and me in golf gear. I miss him to this day.”

You can “read up” on Bergman-Shem at Goodreads.

Updike cited in New Yorker piece on presidents in the novel

Posted on December 11, 2016 by James Plath

In a pre-election piece written for The New Yorker’s Life and Letters section (October 31, 2016), Thomas Mallon considers “2016: The Novel” and mentions Updike in the process.

“In my novel Finale, set during the last years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, I never, except for a few pages in the epilogue, entered Reagan’s consciousness, not because I felt there was nothing there but because what was there looked so smoky and unseizable. In John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom muses upon the fortieth President: ‘You never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself.’ I decided that Reagan, who had eluded capture by his authorized-access biographer, Edmund Morris, was best approached from the outside, through puzzled observers, both admiring and detracting, from Nancy Reagan to Christopher Hitchens—rather the way Gore Vidal gave us his novelized version of Abraham Lincoln, in 1984.”

McEwan says Rabbit books best contender for Great American Novel

Posted on September 3, 2016 by James Plath

In their September 9, 2016 issue (page 9) Entertainment Weekly (EW.com) played 12 questions about books with esteemed writer Ian McEwan, whose new novel, Nutshell, features an unusual narrator: an unborn baby.

Favorite book as a child? The Gauntlet, by Ronald Welch
Book read in secret as a kid? Lady Chatterly’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
Best book read for school? The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley
Book that cemented him as a writer? Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
What he’s read over and over? A few Shakespeare plays, like Hamlet (who stalks through the pages of my new novel)
A book people might be surprised to learn he loves? Coma, by Robin Cook
A book he’s pretended to have read? Ulysses, by James Joyce
His literary hero? The hippie-Hamlet hero of William Kotzwinkle’s novel, The Fan Man
His literary “crush”? English poet Alice Oswald
Early works of his that make him cringe? “I neither cringe nor strut, but I stand by it all”
What he’s reading now? The Age of Em, by Robin Hanson; A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin

And what book does he wish he’d written?

“I wouldn’t mind putting my name to John Updike’s Rabbit sequence—in my view, the best contender for the Great American Novel.”

Updike included in book of contemplative eulogies

Posted on August 26, 2016 by James Plath

Twenty-eight eulogies of “intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawn; musicians like Sun Ra, MCA (Beastie Boys) and Kurt Cobain; writers like David Foster Wallace, John Updike and Tom Clancy; artists like Thomas Kinkade and Robert Rauschenberg; and controversial political figures like Osama bin Laden and Mikhail Kalashnikov” are included in Dead People, by Stefany Anne Golberg and 2013 Whiting Award winner Morgan Meis.

David Lull reports that the essay by Meis on Updike was first published on the Smart Set website as “Updike the Synthesizer.”

In it, Meis cites a descriptive passage of Updike’s and observes, “Reading the above passage from Rabbit, Run, I felt like I was reading one of [John] Dos Passos’ Newsreels. But it also made me realize how much Dos Passos’ USA, brilliant as it is, is a kind of failure. Dos Passos never came up with a sufficient technique by which the bits of actual experience, the real stuff of the time, the names, the brands, the popular songs, etc., could live in the individual stories he was trying to tell. Dos Passos puts those things into his novel, but he has to keep them separate, he has to show that they are ultimately ephiphenomenal to the ‘real’ story.

“Amazingly and consistently, but for the one passage in which he resorts to that long list of stuff on the radio, Updike resists the impulse to divide levels of experience. There is a kind of deep metaphysical democracy to Updike’s prose. The details matter, the specific show being watched on television, the kind of car being driven, because those details are wrapped up in the substance of the experience.”

Article on Shawn lauds Updike too

Posted on August 9, 2016 by johnupdikesociety

In “The Genius of William Shawn, and the Invention of The New Yorker,” David Remnick praises Shawn’s sharp eye for talent,

“that essential component of any institution that wishes to develop: new talent with new things to say. The ’50s saw the rise of one such talent in particular, John Updike, who, for the next 55 years, was an unfailingly prolific and versatile contributor to The New Yorker. His fine-grained prose was there from the start, and, with time, his sharp-eyed intelligence alighted on seemingly every surface, subject, and subtext. Updike was, out of the box, an American writer of first rank. He was profoundly at home at The New Yorker and, at the same time, able to expand the boundaries of its readers’ tastes. He could seem tweedy and suburban—a modern, golf-playing squire—and yet, as a critic, he introduced to the magazine’s readers an array of modernists and postmodernists, along with writing from countries far beyond the Anglo-American boundaries; as a writer of fiction, he was not a revolutionary, but his short stories make up a vast social, political, and erotic history of postwar America, or at least some precincts of it.”

Here’s the full article.

Ozick on Updike: steadily remarkable

Posted on August 9, 2016 by James Plath

In a summer New York Times Book Review interview, “Cynthia Ozick: By the Book,” Ozick mentions Updike in her very first response. Asked what books are currently on her night stand, she replies,

“Nowadays my night stand is a roughly cubical archaeological mount (33 by 25 inches), long awaiting shelf space. From a middle stratum I’ve excavated the regenerative pleasures of rediscovery—all old books: John Updike’s Villages (an aching reminder of the absence of that steadily remarkable literary voice); a Library of America collection of four novels by William Dean Howells (who ought to be venerated at least as much as Willa Cather, if not more); Frank Kermode’s Pieces of My Mind (consummate reflections on subjects ranging from Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver to ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’). And from a lower lode, a pair of memoirs by two boyhood escapees from Nazified Vienna, marking Austria’s loss of a stellar composer and a questioning poet: Robert Starer’s Continuo: A Life in Music and Arthur Gregor’s A Longing in the Land. Finally, on the mound always accreting surface, a weighty volume turned upside down to conceal the face on its cover: a new biography of Adolph Hitler by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German, not yet opened. Will I read it? Will I? Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography.”

The illustration is by Jillian Tamaki.

Updike, a hack? Not a chance

Posted on August 9, 2016 by James Plath

In a piece that appeared in New York Magazine on July 1, 2016, an anonymous author asked, “Does Writing Too Much Make You a Hack?”

“We think of hacks as turning out slick prose bereft of inspiration. As somebody once asked about John Updike, ‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’ (The person who raised the question [David Foster Wallace] had recently published a thousand-page novel with a couple hundred pages of endnotes.) Hacks write so much that we stop reading them. In a culture still enamored of the romantic idea of writerly inspiration, hacks are only too sane, with their formulaic helpings of the familiar. Funny that just a few degrees further on the spectrum of the prolific are graphomaniacs, who are literally insane.

“But there’s a class of prolific writers who are neither nuts nor mercenaries (as all hacks are). They are the ones apt to say things like ‘I’m not even faintly myself when I’m not writing,’ as Saul Bellow confided in a letter to Stanley Elkin. Writers who follow their own star may be guilty of many sins and imperfections related to overproduction, but ultimately that output is a sign of health. ‘Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict,’ Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to.’ I’d swap ‘often’ in for ‘always.’ We don’t live in a world where you have to choose between Updike (nearly 30 novels, some great, some not) and Renata Adler (two perfect ones), but if we did I would prefer Adler’s. Then again, Updike is a sign that inner conflict itself isn’t required for refinement: He claimed to be a one-draft writer who simply abandoned projects if he didn’t think they were working. Ultimately, the question ‘How much?’ yields to the question ‘How good?’ We worry about whether writers are too prolific only because numbers are easier to talk about than words and what they mean.”

Blogger explores Midpoint as a Pointillist Poem

Posted on July 29, 2016 by James Plath

In a July 18 post on the blog Vertigo: Where literature and art intersect, with an emphasis on W.G. Sebald and literature with embedded photographs, a writer identified simply as “Terry” considers “‘Midpoint’: John Updike’s Pointillist Poem.”

His argument: “The pictures [included in Canto II] speak for themselves. A cycle of growth, mating, and birth. The coarse dots, calligraphic and abstract, become faces with troubled expressions. Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable screens.”

“Updike doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to make the photographs approximate any poetic form. There is no apparent rhythmic pattern to the way the photographs are placed on their five pages and the only organizing principle is chronology. The photographs themselves, which are reproduced as halftones, are purposely printed in such a way as to show the dots formed by the halftone screens. (Although, curiously, the halftone dots are strikingly less noticeable on three of the photographs—each of which is a head shot of Updike himself.) At first I wondered if his decision to emphasize the halftone dots might be related to the Pop Art of the time, especially Roy Lichtenstein. While it is certainly possible that Lichtenstein’s work created an awareness on Updike’s part of the underlying dots in halftone reproductions, Updike’s writing is not at all aligned with the goals of Pop Art. Rather, we should take Updike’s word for it that he sees the halftone patterns as a visual symbol of lost time and as a metaphor for distance. A halftone image—like life itself—is easier to see from afar.

Terry concludes with a final argument followed by an excerpt from Midpoint: “The poet strives to conclude, but his aesthetic of dots prevents him. His heroes are catalogued. World politics: a long view. Intelligent hedonistic advice. Chilmark Pond in August. He appears to accept, reluctantly, his own advice.”

Reality transcends itself within;
Atomically, all writers must begin.
The Truth arrives as if by telegraph:
One dot; two dots; a silence; then a laugh.

Poems That Make Grown Women Cry features Updike

Posted on July 29, 2016 by James Plath

An anthology on Poems That Make Grown Women Cry: 100 Women on the Words That Move Them, edited by Anthony and Ben Holden and published this past spring, includes an essay by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown on John Updike’s poem, “Perfection Wasted.”

The book is a follow-up to the father-and-son team’s Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. For the most recent volume they worked with Amnesty Internation and asked the same question of 100 “remarkable women”: “What poem has moved you to tears?”

Here’s the Amazon.com link. You can read “Perfection Wasted” on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion post from Jan. 31, 2009.

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