Jim Higgins, who may be familiar to readers as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel journalist who has been reading an Updike short story weekly and posting his considerations, has been thinking about Updike again—this time in the context of the forthcoming Adam Begley biography, Updike, which will finally be available to the general public next week.
“Adam Begley’s bio makes strong case for rereading ‘Updike'”
Even before it falls into the hands of average readers on April 8, Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, is doing what scholars and society members expected: reawakening the debate over Updike’s status as an American writer.
There has always been a small segment who think he “writes like an angel but has nothing to say,” and reports of his demotion in the canon have been greatly exaggerated, given his continued presence in major anthologies. Michael H. Miller of the New York Observer weighs in, but only concludes “Updike, like George Caldwell in The Centaur, a character modeled after his own father, did the best he could with what was given to him—a massive flawed talent. Here’s the whole article:
Vulture.com today posted a story by Updike biographer Adam Begley—a segment, really, from Updike. For those who can’t wait to get a copy, it’s pretty much an official teaser:
“How John Updike Turned Everything in His Life to His Advantage in Fiction”
Updike will be published on April 8, and is currently available in hardcover from Amazon.com for $21.77 or on Kindle for $14.44.
The Friday, March 21 2014 post for The Bully Pulpit blog was titled “John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World,” in which the writer thoughtfully responds to a long “magisterial” passage from Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.
“Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due’ was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs,” JR Benjamin writes. He considers as well a poem by Philip Larkin and concludes, “Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness” both that informed both Larkin’s and Updike’s sense of religion and church-going.
Adam Gopnik wrote a feature titled “A Fan’s Notes on Updike’s Long Game” for Humanties magazine, Vol. 29 No. 3 (May/June 2008) that finds him concluding that “if the persistent journalist in him is one of the things that has kept his novels alive, it is the satirist and humorist in him that have kept his sentences aloft,” further speculating, “Updike’s affinity for painting and poetry—the still felt desire to have been a painter or poet—is perhaps the secret fuel that keeps the prose shining and still in motion.”
Jim Higgins of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posted another consideration of an Updike story yesterday, still fulfilling his declared purpose of “reading and commenting on a story from The Library of America’s John Updike: The Collected Stories each Wednesday until I finish the collection or give up.” One week’s post was “Wife-wooing.” His full intent is explained in an Introduction, and thus far he’s posted musings on:
“A Sense of Shelter”
“Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car”
“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island”
“The Crow in the Woods”
“Lifeguard”
“The Doctor’s Wife”
“A&P”
“The Astronomer”**
“You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You”
“The Sea’s Green Sameness”
“Archangel”
“Home”
“Pigeon Feathers”**
“A Sense of Shelter”
“Dear Alexandros”
“Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”
“Flight”**
“The Persistence of Desire”
“Walter Briggs”
“The Happiest I’ve Been”**
“The Alligators”
“Intercession”
“A Gift from the City”
“Incest”
“A Trillion Feet of Gas”
“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town”
“Sunday Teasing”
“His Finest Hour”**
“Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”
“Snowing in Greenwich Village”
“Toward Evening”
“The Kid’s Whistling”
“Dentistry and Doubt”
“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth”**
“A Game of Botticelli”
“Friends from Philadelphia”
“Ace in the Hole”
“Unstuck”**
“In Football Season”
“The Indian”
“The Stare”**
“Leaves”
“Solitaire”**
“My Uncle’s Death”
“A Madman”
“Avec la Bebe-sitter”
“Four Sides of One Story”
“The Morning”
“At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie”
Titles with two asterisks he says would make his “hypothetical Best of John Updike collection.” Check back. We’ll add titles as he posts them.
Member John McTavish is eliciting responses from John Updike readers regarding such questions as how they discovered JU, their favorite JU book (and why), which book (and why) they would recommend to new readers, and a memorable line (or lines, or paragraph) from JU.
“I hope to collate the results of the survey and publish them,” McTavish says, “but publish or not, I will email a copy of the accumulated results to all the participants.”
McTavish says he’s already received some “sparkling replies” from a number of people, including Don Greiner, Jack De Bellis, and Biljana Dojcinovic. Send your responses to him at: jmctav@vianet.ca
Former Granta editor John Freeman interviewed a lot of major writers over the course of 13 years—a number that proved lucky for him, as those encounters inspired a book, How to Read a Novelist (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 334 pages). Included is “U and Me: The Hard Lessons of Idolizing John Updike.”
“He’s a great reader, of novels and novelists (hence this collection’s title),” Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News writes. “True to his mission, however, Freeman is quick to get out of the way when the writers have something to say.”
“The only thing an interviewer can do to capture what a novelist does,” [Freeman] writes, “is to make them talk and tell stories, and think aloud. These are not meant to be definitive life profiles but rather glimpses spied through a moving window.”
Author Nick Mattiske writes that he has published a book of reviews in Australia, and in the introduction he draws inspiration from John Updike to “make a few rambling points about reviewing. The introduction also includes a caricature of Updike,” he says, and he “reproduced part of this introduction and the caricature as the first post on my blog,” which can be found here:
“On Ronald Blythe’s almost-most-recent book”
Before he gets into his own book, Mr. Mattiske evaluates another: “As John Updike has noted,” he begins, “Blythe’s work has a particularity about it regarding place that sometimes requires from the reader a measure of understanding of local village and parish life with which Blythe is saturated.”
When he gets to his own volume he cites an Updike quotation: “The communication between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discrimination should curve toward that end.”
Mattiske concludes, “The best reviews open doors to rooms never previously noticed that enrich the reader’s or listener’s experience. There is sometimes a great need for negativity, if that means the critique of sloppy thinking rather than merely the reviewer’s personal distaste, but Updike is right: when one has the pleasure of being immersed in books and music, some measure of enthusiasm should spark off onto the reader.”
Yesterday The Paris Review Daily published “A Resident of Sipswich, MA,” the final installment in a series of Timothy Leo Taranto illustrated author puns.
The drawing speaks for itself. Other authors targeted: Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.