In a reflective critical essay titled “Updike Redux,” published in Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009/2010) of The Common Review, William Giraldi writes, “Of all the American literary titans who have died within the past several years—Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Susan Sontag—John Updike was the most beloved.” Giraldi considers Updike’s popularity, oeuvre and literary legacy and draws a number of conclusions—among them, “We can classify the likes of Goethe and D. H. Lawrence as nothing other than men of letters, masters of many genres, and Updike was their descendant.”

The Common Review, The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation, was founded in 2001 but ceased as a print publication with the Fall/Winter 2011 issue. Thanks to Larry Randen, here’s a PDF of the full Giraldi essay.

Blogger Peter Quinones (Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse, “a blog about cinema and literature with a concentration on Bellow, DeLillo, Updike and Cavell but frequently branching out into so much more”) just posted “Tracking John Updike’s Foot Fetish – Part 1,” which includes six quotes from six of Updike’s publications as evidence and an admission that “this is only scratching the surface.” Here’s the link.

Maria Popova has compiled a number of quotes for an article on “John Updike on Writing and Death,” which was published online at Brain Pickings, much of it drawn from Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness. There are some interesting juxtapositions and conclusions here—like for Updike, “work—especially a writer’s work—serves the same purpose as religion (which, as Mark Twain famously grumbled, is chiefly an anchor of human ego.”

The Independent [London] for September 13, 2013 featured a piece by writer Justin Cartwright, who picked Rabbit at Rest for his “Book of a Lifetime.”

“Rabbit at Rest is a wonderful book, honest, detailed, perceptive and moving,” he writes. “Although quietly charming and without any symptoms of Bohemia, Updike was ruthlessly forensic with his characters. His description of Rabbit’s wayward son, Nelson, is devastating: in contrast to the free pass to life that Rabbit grants himself—he is, in his reckoning, tall, athletic, open and attractive, with a full head of hair—his son is small, balding and furtive with a drug habit and—worse—a trite kind of philophy, confidently uttered. How accurately Updike captures the new banality.”

Here’s the full story.

Some people think Jonathan Franzen is a literary giant; others think he’s just another talent with gigantic arrogance—the kind that enables him to turn down Oprah when every other writer in the country would do headstands for the chance to get that kind of audience.

What you think of him will probably affect what you think of the surprisingly nasty anti-Updike rant he went on in one of the “footnote excerpts” from Franzen’s translation of Austrian writer Karl Kraus that was posted September 6, 2013 on the Paris Review Daily.

What set him off was “Updike’s famous comparison of a writer’s work to excretion: you take in life, digest it, and shit it out in paragraphs,” and that leads him to a remarkably long and vitriolic rant which feels in part like a confession and part shotgun blast that also manages to shower a few buckshot pellets in Philip Roth’s direction.

It all sounds terribly Freudian, doesn’t it? Kill the [literary] father(s), and all that . . . . Some may smile that he also may have confirmed the excrement analogy with an example of his own.

The Guardian posted a rather grouchy column by Colin Robinson, “Writers should take a year off, and give us all a break,” illustrated by a photo of an older John Updike in backswing, looking at the flight of his drive.

“What if everyone stopped scribbling for a year? Will Self could pull on his hiking boots, Martin Amis could sharpen his tennis serve, and we could catch up on our reading,” Robinson writes. Apparently the glut of established writers is made even more pressing by a statistic he quotes:  that according the The New York Times, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them.

Sometimes it takes a while for things to rise to the top in that massive cache of Internet offerings, as happened with two 2009 tributes to John Updike—one written by Michael Dirda for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the other posted by “an Indian fan.”

“John Updike, 1932-2009”
Dirda’s tribute, posted on February 13, 2009, includes some interesting observations. “Updike recognized that American literature and American art often occupy a realm between fantasy and reality, that they rely on mystery and symbolism as much as on apt observation, that our greatest novelists and painters are constantly edging into the magical and dreamlike,” Dirda writes, concluding, “Updike’s own fiction feels grounded in archetypes, touched with romance and myth.” Here’s the link to the full essay.

“An Indian fan of American writer John Updike”
Journalist Shevlin Sebastian, who has worked for magazines and newspapers in Kolkata, Kochi, and Mumbai and now writes for the New Indian Express in Kochi, posted his Updike tribute on February 4, 2009. “At the American Centre library in Kolkata, where I was a regular visitor, there would always be a row of Updike books,” Sebastian writes. He expresses one “enduring regret”—that Updike’s death removed him from consideration for the Nobel Prize. Here is a link to the full post.

Scholars haven’t done much with Updike’s children’s books, but blogger Maria Popova (“Brain Pickings”) notes that Updike’s A Child’s Calendar, originally published in 1965, was updated for a 1999 re-release to be more racially inclusive.

Trina Schart Hyman’s illustrations feature mixed ethnicities that were absent from the original book. Popova observes that Updike even made slight changes to the text in order to “celebrate diversity,” and cites examples.

Here’s the article—“A Child’s Calendar: John Updike’s Vintage Children’s Book, Updated to Celebrate Diversity”—with poems and illustrations.