Catholic blog considers theology based on Pigeon Feathers

Posted on July 29, 2016 by James Plath

The blog Catholic Strength, subtitled “…growth in holiness…growth in well-being…growth in knowledge,” has published a piece by Tom Mulcahy, M.A., on “A Theology of Death and Resurrection Based on Pigeon Feathers.”

“John Updike’s short story, ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ presents a striking example of a person who undergoes a death and resurrection experience in the very context of trying to understand the meaning of death,” Mulcahy writes. “In Updike’s story, David, at age 14, suddenly finds himself doubting his childhood faith at a time when the turbulence of a move to a new home has him feeling displaced and insecure. To strengthen his childhood belief in life after death, which he finds under attack after browsing through a book skeptical of Jesus’ resurrection, he turns to his parents for guidance and support. To his own surprise, David finds out that his parents’ faith in the claims of Christianity is not altogether that strong. In fact, David discovers, his father is practically an atheist!

“Still, David holds out hope that his minister, Reverend Dopson, will confirm that each person’s soul is immortal. But far from providing David with consolation, Dopson shatters David’s security in life after death by suggesting thathttps://catholicstrengthblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/bird-368924_640.jpg after death, ‘I suppose you could say that our souls are asleep.’

“Panicked and depressed about his parents’ and minister’s ‘submission to death,’ David takes a rifle out to the family barn to shoot some pigeons. With ‘splinters of light’ shining through the darkness of the barn, the barn becomes almost a micro-universe for David to work out his struggles with the issues of life and death. David then proceeds to the task of retrieving the dead pigeons he has shot in order to bury them.

“David had never seen a pigeon up close before. An examination of some of the dead pigeons up close produced a resurrection in his life. . . . David had to die to his childhood faith in order to be reborn into a deeper, more mature faith. He had to take control over his own faith life rather than living it vicariously through his parents or his minister. He had to shoot down his childhood faith in order to see how precious and costly that faith was to him. The wonderful form, symmetry and beauty of the pigeon feathers revealed to David the majestic presence of a loving God. David discovered in a moment of time a transcendent truth: that God loved him with an everlasting love.”

Rabbit, Run lauded for literary mastery

Posted on July 25, 2016 by James Plath

Brian Hancock, writing for the Franklin Favorite, called “Rabbit, Run a lesson in literary mastery.”

“Rabbit, Run is a fine display of Updike’s masterful grip on prose. Incredibly creative similes and metaphors are employed throughout the work, to the point where the novel becomes a literacy lesson in itself.

“It’s not just the prose where Updike succeeds, though, but through narrative disguise as well. Rabbit, who initially appears to be a lovable little character, perhaps isn’t what the reader first thought at all,” he writes.

Would Rabbit have been a Trump supporter?

Posted on July 15, 2016 by James Plath

In an article published on the Front Porch Republic, JUS member Scott Dill asks the question, “Would Rabbit Angstrom Vote for Trump?”

The answer is complicated.

On the one hand, “Rabbit was ‘ever the loyal citizen. God he can doubt, but not America,'” and his brand of nationalistic patriotism is the same sort that Trump is peddling. As Dill notes, “Rabbit’s patriotism was accompanied by nostalgia, racism, sexism, and a general anti-cosmopolitanism to the extent that, were Updike around to give us another installment, it would probably involve at least one Trump rally.

“Wouldn’t Rabbit, after years of bemoaning the changing racial demographic and economic fortunes of his hometown (a thinly veiled Reading, PA), look to Trump to give meaning to his years of growing resentment? His once magical childhood city would still be crumbling around him, drugs and divorce had worn down his family, the country’s loss of loyalty would likely still irk. Oh to be great again!”

But Rabbit was also a lover of beauty and he appreciated the little things. “Sidewalks and pies and sunshine—they were worth savoring in themselves. For Rabbit, life in its fullest flourishing was what happened in the quotidian moments of middle-class striving.

“Which is part of why Rabbit tended to agree with his father’s politics, and voted Democratic. Earl Angstrom once praised Medicare and the moon landing in the same peon to the Democrats’ beneficent protection: ‘They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon’ll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put ’em there, it’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson—the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.'”

Dill avoids answering his own question, but fans of the Rabbit novels will remember that Rabbit may have been a simple blue-collar worker but he also had a powerful curiosity and a sense of history being made as events unfolded. He would have attended a Trump rally not necessarily out of conviction but because it was part of American history happening right before his eyes. Rabbit had a powerful curiosity and an open mind—enough to try to understand the perspective of a black militant in Rabbit Redux—and he would have seriously considered the arguments for electing both Clinton and Trump.

In the end, would he have voted for Trump? Probably not. As Dill writes, “Rabbit once memorably exulted that America was ‘the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen!’ His country is a cherished occasion for loving the unrepeatable particularities of his own life.” For all his flaws, Rabbit was an optimistic, positive individual, a glass half-full kind of guy, especially when it came to America. As Updike told an interviewer, Rabbit is “a hopeful man, who, at his best, was in love with life.” And Updike, who voted for Democrats his entire life but famously supported the Vietnam War, couldn’t abide the “kind of American self-hatred” that emerged from the anti-war people. In the end, though Dill doesn’t say so, odds are that Updike and Rabbit would have been put off by the inherent negativity of Trump’s message.

U and I included on a tales of conceptual fathers list

Posted on June 30, 2016 by James Plath

On the blog Literary Hub, Adam Ehrlich Sachs compiled a thoughtful list of “Six Tales About Fathers and Sons That Do Not Feature Fathers And Sons; Adam Ehrlich Sachs on Vast, Fathomless, and Multifarious Conceptual Fathers.”

His picks?

A Message from the Emperor (Franz Kafka)

The Verificationist (Donald Antrim)

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Peter Gay)

“Babel in California” from The Possessed (Elif Batuman)

“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” from Untimely Meditations (Friedrich Nietzsche)

U and I (Nicholson Baker)

Of the latter he identifies Updike as the father and Baker as the son. “Something similar to Nietzsche’s exaltation of ignorance and forgetting over knowledge and memory seems to animate Nicholson Baker’s decision not to reread any Updike—or to read any of the Updike he had not yet read—before embarking on this reckoning with his literary progenitor: rather than embalm the actual Updike with artificial erudition, he wants to portray the warped but living Bakerian Updike that occupies his, Baker’s, head, inspiring and intimidating him, spurring and silencing him, proscribing certain images (drizzle on a window screen) and words (“consort”) from Baker’s fiction because Updike got them down first.”

Here’s the entire article.

Angell reads and talks about editing Updike

Posted on June 30, 2016 by James Plath

The New Yorker fiction podcast “Roger Angell Reads John Updike” features Updike’s long-time editor reading his story “Playing with Dynamite” and talking with current New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about editing Updike.

Here’s the link.

Blogger finds inspiration in Updike

Posted on April 25, 2016 by James Plath

Blogger Lori Carlson has challenged herself to post entries from “A to Z” and her entry for “U” is “John Updike Inspires Me.” On her blog, As the Fates Would Have It, she writes that she was told not to read Updike when she was 13 but did so anyway.

“His Rabbit series was my first taste of his writing, which I continued to read up until the last one was published in 1990. I also read The Witches of Eastwick around 1984 and The Widows of Eastwick in 2008. Over the years, I have probably devoured around 15 of his novels, two of his poetry books and even a few of his non-fiction works. What inspires me the most about Updike’s writing is that he speaks to the everyman with his topics of morality, mortality, religion, death and sex. And as my old high school English teacher would say, he ‘knows how to use his words.'”

“#atozchallenge—John Updike Inspires Me”

A feminist’s belated take on Updike’s Couples

Posted on April 24, 2016 by James Plath

Writing for the L.A. Review of Books, writer Meghan O’Gieblyn confesses, “Like so many women who came of age after the turn of the millennium, I was warned about John Updike almost as soon as I became aware of him. There was David Foster Wallace, who, in a 1997 review, popularized the epithet (attributed to a female friend), ‘Just a penis with a thesaurus.’ Then there was the writer Emily Gould, who placed him among the ‘midcentury misogynists’—a pantheon that also included Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. Perhaps most memorably, there was novelist and essayist Anna Shapiro, who claimed that Updike’s novels left the female reader ‘hoping that the men in your own life weren’t, secretly, seeing you that way—as a collection of compelling sexual organs the possession of which doomed you to ridicule-worthy tastes and concerns.'”

In “Paradise Lost: On (Finally) Reading John Updike,” she views the criticism of Updike through the lens of her own cultural experience and offers her belated analysis of Couples, the first edition of which she found at a condo she rented in Florida, having “decided it was time to give the old leech a shot.”

“Beneath the antiquated details of Updike’s description, there are surely echoes of my own generation, whose mild rebellions have involved learning to make Greek yogurt from scratch and building tiny houses out of reclaimed wood. But the residents of Tarbox are also steadfast products of their time, an era wedged awkwardly between the explosion of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution.”

O’Gieblyn concludes, “While the women in the novel are not without sexual agency, there’s an obvious power imbalance in all of this experimentation. Even when they initiate affairs, the women are never in control of them; it is the men who dictate the terms and invariably decide when and how they will end. More often than not, women are forced to use sex as a kind of currency—for revenge, for equality—and when they need furtive abortions, they are compelled to trade prurient acts for medical assistance.” But she concedes, “While the book is not exactly sympathetic to [women], the reality of these conditions is rendered with a sharp eye, through characters who are emotionally convincing. For what it’s worth, the book does not pretend that swinging—still referred to in those days as ‘wife-swapping’—benefitted all parties in equal measure.” She also notes, “Nobody can write the female body in decay quite like Updike.”

“Still, there was plenty in the book that lived up to Updike’s contemporary reputation: women who think things no woman would think. . . . .”

Ultimately, O’Gieblyn thinks that “Couples, like all great novels, can and has been read in myriad ways, but among them it might be regarded as a document of one man’s fears about the limits of his own dominion—his dawning premonition that paradise is tenuous, and his to lose.”

Will we ever see another Rabbit or Portnoy?

Posted on April 10, 2016 by James Plath

That’s the question that comes immediately to mind when you read Steven Kurutz’s New York Times feature “John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel.”

Colapinto’s novel Undone has been deemed “too tricky” because of its frank subject matter. Forty-one publishers turned it down before a small independent press in Canada decided to take a chance. And yet, as Kurutz points out, “Roth, Mailer and Updike were far more graphic in their descriptions decades ago. So why not be explicit in 2016?

“‘I can’t do it,’ Mr. Colapinto said. ‘I can’t go there. It shocks me when I see Updike do it.'”

That won’t set well with Katie Roiphe, whom Kurutz describes as having “lamented the inability of male novelists to reckon with lust in a 2009 essay in The New York Times, and not much has changed in the years since. For the crew of writers that includes Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, she wrote, ‘Innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.'”

So will we ever see another Rabbit or Portnoy? Not if 41 publishers pass on a novel that seems tame by comparison.

The Writer’s Almanac remembers Updike’s birthday

Posted on March 18, 2016 by James Plath

Garrison Keillor, who will be the keynote speaker at this fall’s Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference at the University of South Carolina, today paid tribute to John Updike on what would have been the author’s 84th birthday.

In “Mar. 18, 2016: birthday: John Updike,” Keillor recalls Updike’s early ambitions to be a cartoonist, his love affair with Pennsylvania, and the novel that brought him national attention.

When Updike died, he was hailed as America’s last great man of letters, but did he write any books that will be considered “a classic” years from now?

In “The Disappearance of Literature,” Mark Twain lamented, “A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Echoing that, in Rite of Passage Alexei Panshin wrote, “Classics aren’t books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of ‘levels of significance’ and other blatt, books that are dead.” That implies it’s the “academy” that confers the title of “classic,” and if such is the case, it’s worth considering how Updike fares among overlapping contemporaries when it comes to number of articles written by academics and indexed in the International MLA Bibliography. The list below isn’t all-inclusive, but it features writers who have inspired at least 500 articles:

Jorge Luís Borges—4,524
Vladimir Nabokov—3,364
Toni Morrison—2,397
Gabriel Garcia Marquez—2,019
Saul Bellow—1,460
Mario Vargas Llosa—1,245
Richard Wright—1,202
Italo Calvino—1,110
Günter Grass—1,078
Graham Greene—1,038
Philip Roth—971
Zora Neale Hurston—937
Don DeLillo—876
James Baldwin—817
Juan Rulfo—791
John Updike—776
V.S. Naipaul—775
Umberto Eco—762
Cormac McCarthy—755
Norman Mailer—735
Alice Walker—682
Bernard Malamud—585

It’s still too early to tell how Updike will be remembered well into the future, but if one considers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a classic he certainly stands a good chance: “A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it’s safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It’s acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion….” (The Beautiful and the Damned). More than any of his contemporaries, Updike was a writer who was both a popular and critical success. And as Cliff Fadiman, former head of the Book-of-the-Month Club, once explained, “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” Updike’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction continue to touch people on a very human level. Would that he were still writing among us.

Happy 84th!

Writer summarizes his year spent reading Updike

Posted on January 27, 2016 by James Plath

Yesterday The Christian Science Monitor printed a piece titled “My ‘Updike year’—why I appreciate the man more now than ever” in its Books/Chapter & Verse section. In it, Danny Heitman writes that he had made it a point to read as many of John Updike’s books as he could in 2015, but, being a slow reader, he “managed to read only a fraction of the Updike canon, poking around mostly in the personal essays and criticism collected in a half a dozen volumes, including Odd Jobs, Hugging the Shore and Picked-up Pieces.”

About the experience, he writes, “What I remember most vividly from my year of Updike isn’t a particular subject or turn of phrase; he wrote about everything from baseball to cemeteries to the postal service with precision, wit, and a mastery of language that defies easy summary. No, the most abiding memory of my Updike year is the heroic moderation of the man—his quiet insistence on teasing out an insight with subtlety and grace, never raising his voice. . . .

“That voice continues to be a tonic for me as I negotiate the noise of the headlines, the extremism of the political culture, the venom-tinged pronouncements of the Twittersphere. Updike’s been gone for seven years now, but his work endures, and we need it now more than ever.”

Heitman is a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana and the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.

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