Dybek reviewer cites Updike as a major influence

paperlanternCharles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:

“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.

ecstaticcahoots“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’

“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”

But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.

Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.

 

Updike gets a mention in The Keillor Reader

Screen Shot 2014-05-28 at 3.30.05 PMGarrison Keillor, the NPR humorist best known for his tall tales of Lake Wobegon, published a new book earlier this month, and member Larry Randen reports that John Updike is prominently mentioned in the introduction of The Keillor Reader:

“I think often of John Updike, who lovingly re-created the backyards and clotheslines of the 1940s small town and described a snowstorm as ‘an immense whispering’ and wrote beautifully of his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform and astonishing him by planting a kiss on his cheek. I last saw John on the New York subway, riding from 155th Street down to 72nd, a white-haired gent of seventy-five grinning like a school kid. At 110th a gang of seminarians boarded and crowded around him, chattering, not recognizing him, and he sat soaking it up, delighted, surrounded by material” (xxxi).

Randen says that he and his wife, Lollie, went to hear Keillor read from his new book at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., and that Updike also was mentioned during a Q&A session.

According to Randen, “The first question was: ‘Who is/was your favorite writer?’ Keillor said, ‘John Updike’ and offered a few sentences about how good Updike’s writing was and then added an anecdote about ‘The Last Time I Saw Updike a Couple Years Before His Death.’

“In his response to the first question he told the same account [as he included in the introduction] but added that ‘the seminarians were excitedly arguing about Karl Barth, a favorite neo-orthodox theologian who was also a favorite of Updike’s; the students had just come from a lecture about Barth and were caught up with discussing issues about Barth, pro and con, and hearing this pleased Updike to no end as he sat there anonymously soaking the moment up and smiling, perhaps, because another generation had discovered Barth.”

Here’s a link to the Amazon.com sell-page for The Keillor Reader, where you can “look inside” and see the table of contents and a sample chapter.

 

Summer reading list includes Updike biography

Jim Higgins, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has posted “96 books for your summer reading,” and topping the category titled “12 Editor’s Picks” is Updike, Adam Begley’s “sympathetic but honest biography of the writer, which pays close attention to the ways John Updike frequently transmuted real-life incidents into his fiction.”

Other categories:  “14 Books We’ve Already Liked,” “8 Books for Recent Graduates,” “11 Books by Wisconsin Writers,”  “10 Visiting Writers,” “8 Mysteries and Thrillers,” “5 Pop Culture Books,” “7 Visually Appealing Books,” “18 Books for Children and Teens,” and “5 Books for Baseball Fans.”

Updike poem inspires tuba composition

The San Jose Mercury-News ran a story about a physics professor and composer named Brian Holmes who says he was inspired to write a piece for chorus and tuba by John Updike’s poem, “Recital.”

That composition will have its world premiere on May 31 at Lincoln Glen Church, featuring Symphony Silicon Valley tuba player Tony Clements as soloist.

“Updike was inspired to write the poem after seeing a headline in the New York Times that read ‘Roger Bobo Gives Recital on the Tuba’ on a story about the tuba virtuoso who spent 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“‘I agree with Updike that the words ‘Bobo’ and ‘tuba’ are immensely silly in one headline,’ Holmes says.

“Updike took this silliness and ran with it; the first stanza of ‘Recital’ reads, ‘Eskimos in Manitoba / Barracuda off Aruba / Cock an ear when Roger Bobo / Starts to solo on the tuba.’

“Holmes’ piece sticks to the poems text but plays with Bobo’s name a bit more.”

According to the article by Anne Gelhaus, it’s not the first time that Holmes has found inspiration in Updike.

 

 

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson: Begley on “Mighty Mothers”

The ubiquitous Adam Begley has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Adam Begley on mighty mothers,” in which he names five books that feature dominant matriarchs. Given his recent biography of John Updike it’s no surprise that he included Updike, and even less of a surprise that the book he chose was Of the Farm, the novel that Updike has said was written about his mother. You need to subscribe to access the full article, which was published in the Bookshelf/Life & Culture section on May 16, 2014, but here’s what he had to say about Updike:

Screen Shot 2014-05-17 at 6.05.05 AMOf the Farm

By John Updike (1965)

4. There are only four voices in this gem of a novel, a fractious quartet performing under a spotlight in and around an elderly widow’s isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse. Joey Robinson, a 35-year-old mama’s boy, has brought his second wife, Peggy, and her young son to visit Joey’s garrulous, manipulative mother. By the second night, Joey’s mother has bullied him into agreeing that Peggy is vulgar and stupid and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. After an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee, mother and son achieve a kind of mutual forgiveness. But when all the skirmishes are done, and all the wounds more or less neatly bandaged, Joey and his mother engage in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she is dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects: “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” He says, “Your farm? . . . I’ve always thought of it as our farm.” The mother-son conspiracy endures.

The Other John Updike Archive is posting again

After a brief hiatus, The Other John Updike Archive is posting again:

“In Every Dream Home A Heartache”

“Will you still love me tomorrow?”

“And In The Beginning…”

Couples: The story you’re about to read is true…

“Celestial Seasonings (on being JUish)”

“Here’s looking up your old address”

Cape Fear Redux

“Ex Pat Updike? Not bloody likely!”

Begley weighs in with his Top 10 Updike short stories

In a story that appeared today, Updike biographer Adam Begley shared his picks for “Top 10 John Updike short stories” with The Guardian. Click on the link for details, but we won’t keep you in suspense for his picks:

“The Happiest I’ve Been” (1958)

“Separating” (1974)

“A&P” (1960)

“A Sandstone Farmhouse” (1990)

“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island” (1960)

“The Bulgarian Poetess” (1964)

“Bech in Czech” (1986)

“Problems” (1975)

“Here Come the Maples” (1976)

“My Father’s Tears” (2005)

Whether by choice or by happy accident, it’s worth noting that Begley’s list contains a story from every decade Updike worked as a professional writer.

Updike, transubstantiation, and John Donne

More literary musings from Paul Elie of Georgetown University. In his April 30, 2014 Everything That Rises blogpost he springboards again off of “Louis Menand’s characterization of John Updike as a novelist who understood his way of writing as ‘transubstantiating'” and explores a connection between Updike and poet John Donne, speculating on others. Here’s the link:

“John Updike, Calling John Donne”

John Updike, Transubstantiator?

Georgetown University blogger Paul Elie is at it again, riffing off of a Louis Menand review of the new Begley biography of Updike in a short think piece titled “John Updike, Transubstantiator.” 

In an April 25, 2014 entry on Everything That Rises, Elie begins with Menand’s characterization of Updike as “a priest of literature who performed rites of transubstantiation akin to those of Joyce and Proust” and acknowledges that there’s “plenty of testimony” to be found to support such a view. But he also suggests that one shouldn’t make too much of this “congenial” argument—”not to make it the skeleton key that will unlock his large and various body of work.

“Yes, Updike hung photographs of Joyce and Proust on his office wall. But he also revered Nabokov, whose sense of transcendence is strictly, fiercely artistic; he had American realists like Sinclair Lewis in the front of his mind; and unlike the modernist priests of art he cherished his readers, many of them people who saw no reason that American life should need transubstantiating—people who recognized postwar America as a kind of earthly paradise.”

John Updike, Chronicler: a review of a review

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 7.41.27 PMEverything That Rises, out of Georgetown University, published a think piece by Paul Elie that’s a review of (or at least reaction to) writer Orhan Pamuk’s review of Adam Begley’s biography, Updike.

In “John Updike, Chronicler,” Elie notes that Pamuk “all but came out and said the thinkable-unsayable—that Updike was more vital as an essayist than as a novelist” and wonders,

“So why isn’t Updike appreciated as an essayist? Possibly because just as there is no single essential Updike novel, there is no single essential Updike essay (the one about Ted Williams’ last game comes closest). . . . That Updike was a chronicler is true of his essays, too. He chronicled his own life: his coming of age, and his aging. He chronicled the art world through several decades of museum and gallery show reviews. And he chronicled postwar fiction from Nabokov to Pamuk himself in several hundred book reviews. He even chronicled the waxing and waning (mainly the waning) of religious feeling and current trends in Christian theology. The essays, beautifully turned in themselves, were never meant to stand along (though many do). They are set at a very wide angle to their time and place—the angle formed by the pages of an opened New Yorker.”