Robert M. Detman, who maintains a blog on The Literary, recently explored what could only be termed his ambivalence toward John Updike and his writing in a post titled “The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction.”

“In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life,” he writes. “I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

“What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience—admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.”

Of course, Updike isn’t the first major author to write highly autobiographical fiction. Ernest Hemingway quickly comes to mind, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Independent asked 100 “leading figures of British literature to name the characters who give them the most reading pleasure.”

Author and critic John Sutherland (A Little History of Literature) picked Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom, the serial hero of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, is the only protagonist I’ve grown old with—doomed, but indomitable and lovable,” he writes.

If you’re wondering what other American literary fictional characters made the list, Rhett Butler (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind) was chosen, as was Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed hero Dick Diver (Tender Is the Night), Humbert Humbert (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita), Patrick Bateman (Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho), and Herman Melville’s white whale (Moby-Dick).

Two of Philip Roth’s characters (Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath) made the list, but Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 scored the most, with literary figures choosing three characters from that comic war novel: Yossarian, Dunbar, and Milo.

“Best fictional characters from Sherlock Holmes to Jane Eyre as chosen by 100 literary figures”

Yesterday blogger Kimberly Campbell Moore (Eleven and a Half Years of Books) posted an entry titled “Rabbit At Rest—John Updike” in which she reacts to the fourth book in the Rabbit tetralogy and offers links to her responses to the other Rabbit novels.

She begins, “First off, for those of you here to read more of my Rabbit rantings, this might be a slightly disappointing blog post. While I was still not overly fond of Rabbit, something about him had softened so something about myself softened as well. Once that did, I was able to really, finally, appreciate why people rave about the Rabbit books. Updike is amazing in Rabbit at Rest. I’m not going to go back and try to read the others with this realization, as I don’t care to spend any more time with Rabbit Angstrom. But! I can see better now the reasons.

So, this post will probably be more about Updike and his writing than my hatred for that asshole, Rabbit Angstrom.”

She concludes, “Try reading the first one, if you can get past Rabbit’s asshole status in that one, then maybe you can stick it out to this one and end the series with the best book of the quartet in my opinion.”

Somewhere in between, she admits, “I actually found this book compelling and very readable” . . . despite her feelings about Rabbit. If that isn’t a testament to a great writer, I don’t know what is.

The August 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine contains this letter from writer Lawrence Grobel telling of Updike’s refusal to grant him an interview for Playboy:

Rabbit, Refuse

In his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike [“Agreeable Angstrom,” June], Jonathan Dee writes that Updike’s “life consisted of saying yes to everything, and of questioning nothing.” I read that with amusement, remembering how I tried, for years, to get Updike to agree to a Playboy interview with me. I corresponded with him about it and went to see him when he gave a talk at the Los Angeles Public Library. I had previously done interviews with James A. Michener, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Saul Bellow, and I thought just mentioning these writers would clinch the deal, but when I said to Updike, “Saul Bellow agreed,” he just looked at me and smiled wryly. “Yes, I read it,” he said.

Lawrence Grobel
Los Angeles