Click on Victor Bond’s Golf Dream blog and you’ll discover that the most recent post is “John Updike, Golfer” by David Owen, which begins, “If golfers were allowed to vote for the Nobel Prize in literature, John Updike would have won it in 1991, when The New Yorker published his short story ‘Farrell’s Caddie.'” The article-remembrance originally appeared in the April 2008 Golf Digest.
Here’s the link.
Financial Review (Australia) published a letter to the editor on July 18 in response to a July 11 review of Adam Begley’s Updike:
John Updike in good company
John Updike joins a long line of celebrated authors who have written novels thinly based on their personal relationships with others (“A life well read”, Review, July 11).
The much-travelled Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene developed fictional characters partly drawn from their accommodating hosts and thus easily recognisable in small towns in remote and exotic locations. However, it would be hard to beat one of the lurid plotlines in Edmund Schiddell’s The Devil in Bucks County. The embarrassed people of Doylestown have never forgiven Schiddell for that public indiscretion. Updike also scandalised his native Pennsylvania.
There must be something weird in the water in that state.
Mike Fogarty
Weston, ACT
Karen Heller, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, posted a piece titled “Send us your nominees for great Pennsylvanians” in response to a Harper poll that placed Ben Franklin at the top of the list, followed by Bill Cosby.
“The list goes downhill from there,” Heller writes, adding that Cosby is “the sole choice who isn’t long dead.
“But Pennsylvania has offered the country so much since the time of Penn and Ben. In the arts, we have Thomas Eakins, Andy Warhol, Mary Cassatt, Frank Furness, James Stewart, Will Smith, three Barrymores, and two splendid Kellys, Gene and Grace.
“In music, Pennsylvania produced Marian Anderson, Oscar Hammerstein, John Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Stan Getz, Sun Ra, Hall and Oates, Gamble and Huff, Pink and Taylor Swift. The state produces terrific writers: John Updike, August Wilson, John O’Hara, muckraking Ida Tarbell, Rachel Carson, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mead. The commonwealth can do funny: W.C. Fields, Tina Fey, and the tonsorially challenged third of the Stooges, Larry Fine.”
She asked readers to move “Toward a better list of great Pennsylvanians.”
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”
Today Whispering Gums, a blog devoted to books and such, posted a review of John Updike’s short story, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd.”
“I love the complexity of this,” the blogger writes, “the fact that Updike has chosen to tell this story through decidedly subjective eyes, and yet has managed to leave the interpretation surprisingly open. It’s a story, I suspect, that can be read very differently depending on each reader’s experience and point of view, despite some givens in the text.”
“John Updike, The lovely troubled daughters of our old crowd (Review)”
Yesterday a blogger responded to Heather Havrilesky’s New York Times Magazine piece on “794 Ways in Which BuzzFeed Reminds us of Impending Death” on PottedReads, “a blog about reading and writing.”
He begins, “Having rediscovered John Updike, never having deeply read his work, until now, my late middle age, after reading Adam Begley’s new biography, Updike, I don’t seem to be able to get enough of reading his work. I can’t say for certain why. Maybe it’s the way Begley wrote Updike by braiding his work with his life that made me interested in reading him again. Maybe because Updike was a writer, first and foremost, something I’ve always wanted, which must have made his loved ones suffer. My curiosity was renewed. Updike wrote about his experience without hardly any boundaries between his life and his fiction. That’s quite a feat that some think was a trick of style, and not art, which it truly is. It also occurred to me that I wasn’t ready to read Updike until now. I probably avoided him not unlike I avoid myself by usually doing what I have to do without doing what I need to do. Updike’s not a chore, but a pleasure with a price, not unlike most good things. Yes, he created a crisis of confidence that’s anxious and distracting by making us focus on what’s important. Not pleasing others at the expense of ourselves, knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, and moving forward accordingly.”
He adds, “The beauty of Havrilesky’s essay lies not only in making me understand BuzzFeed, using Updike to do it, but by incorporating Updike’s fiction into herself so that she could tell us about how they’re connected and why. By writing this essay she made Updike hers, and translated her appreciation of his work to mine. I can’t tell where Updike finished, and Havrilesky starts. I envy her that feat. It’s Eucharistic, and what reading’s all about. Changing you from leading an everyday life into a liturgical one.
“Updike knew that about reading, and writing. That’s why he could write hard about his life. If he wrote soft, his fiction would be faithless. Instead, it’s not. Updike’s stories and novels are a modern-day spiritual reckoning. His readers don’t know where his life ends and his fiction begins. It’s intimidating because he writes so well, and painful because it’s true. It takes a mature personality to understand what Updike’s saying in such a unifying way, that you want to deny it, dismiss him, and turn away. If we don’t like it then that’s tough, and probably another reason why some critics have mistakenly judged Updike as a self-absorbed show off. He’s not. Updike aimed for transubstantiation . . . His mystery isn’t that he could turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, but that he could turn our everyday lives into invincible prose, that we could own for ourselves.”
Read the full article, “Oh, what a feeling, Toyota!”
Before Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike, could Updike fans have imagined how many mid-year best-of reading lists there are?
Yet another one emerges—this time from The Guardian, offering a round-up of writers and staffers with their picks for summer holiday reading. And Mark Lawson, a Guardian columnist and theater critic, selected Updike as one of his best books.
“Two long-awaited lives that I couldn’t wait until summer to read were Updike by Adam Begley (Harper) – which gives equal weight to my favourite novelist’s life and books and the often eye-watering overlaps between them – and Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life by John Campbell (Jonathan Cape), which achieves an equally impressive balance between policies and peccadillos. Two works that I will read in the summer months are: John Carey’s memoir The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books (Faber) and Philip Hensher’s novel The Emperor Waltz, which, from flicking, seems to continue his bold experiments with form.”
“Best holiday reads 2014 – top authors recommend their favourites”
The blog Short Story Magic Tricks is dedicated to helping would-be writers learn “tricks” from established writers. By the site’s own description, “At Short Story Magic Tricks we attempt to break down and analyze what we like about each story. . . . To that end, each post will highlight a different short story, featuring a favorite magic trick employed by its author.”
The featured Updike short story posted thus far is “Here Come the Maples,” and the “magic trick” is Updike’s capacity for “filling the story with small, razor-sharp truths.”
“In the hands of a lesser writer, this story could fall apart as a maudlin diary entry. But Updike sprinkles in all these little moments that make the reader feel the feelings of the protagonist. These details are so spot-on, the reader can’t help but relate and say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s it exactly. That’s how it was for me once too.’ The story is no longer a thinly veiled Updike autobiography; it stands in for the reader’s own personal history as well. And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.”
Read the full entry: “‘Here Come The Maples’ by John Updike”
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.