Category Archives: First Person Singular

On reading Updike’s stories in Japan

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Writer Daniel Clausen posted a review of Updike’s 40 Stories on Goodreads that was more a personal story of reading and engaging with a text than it was a standard review . . . and, like Updike’s stories, the introspective meandering made it more interesting. Clausen confesses to having a hard time concentrating back in 2021 when he read the stories. “I remembered the story ‘The A&P’ from long ago and thought I might try 39 more stories by John Updike. I would read them in various locales of Nagasaki. The book itself was in my university library. Its pages were brown and yellowing. I was busy that semester, which is why I had trouble concentrating.

“I’m sorry. I’m lying. Let me start over. I had started a new job at the university, and I was gripped with anxiety. Would I be good at my new job? Would the coronavirus ever end? What would I do now that I was almost forty? Would I be able to finish my novel?”

Clausen is the author of a collection of short stories and essays, Something to Stem the Diminishing (2015).

Christopher Lydon considers John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’

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Boston radio’s Christopher Lydon has interviewed Updike on numerous occasions, and now he’s turned his admiration for Updike into “Open Source” conversations. In “John Updike and his Terrorist,” Lydon shares an interview he did with Updike about the post-9/11 novel and adds his own comments:

“Terrorist is cinematic and political—wonderfully so, as I read it. It may be as close to the movie Syriana as we’ll ever get from Updike.

“It’s not for me to vouch that he nailed every answer here. But I can report the huge pleasure for one reader—picking up a piece of our conversation recently on The Great American Novel—in ‘public’ fiction, masterfully made, encompassing the depressive high-school guidance counsellor Jack Levy, and the hateful Secretary of Homeland Security, whose name sounds like Haffenreffer; and at the center of it all, Ahmad Ashmawy Mullow at the brink of manhood, flickering between earnestness and extremism, trying to solidify a Muslim consciousness in what feels like a wasteland of selfishness and materialism.'”

On January 28, 2009, one day after Updike died, Lydon had paid tribute to the legendary writer who chose the Boston area for his home for his adult life, in “John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose”: “John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books—novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and In the Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories like ‘Pigeon Feathers’ about a boy’s crisis of faith, which ends in his famous meditation on the pigeons he’s shot, on orders, in his mother’s barn, and the irresistible beauty of the blue and gray patterns in their dull coloring.”

Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection

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British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations. In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It’s a delicious counterpoint to Evans’s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples with influencing Ordinary People, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other’s fingertips?'”

Look for Updike in special century New Yorker collections

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For this entry we need to thank writer Sherman Alexie for calling it to our attention. Alexie gleefully (and deservedly so) posted, “There are only three writers who have work in both A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker [edited by Kevin Young] and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker [edited by Deborah Treisman]: John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and me.” Alexie adds, “All I can do is laugh at how impossible this feels! It’s such a long cultural and economic journey for the reservation Indian boy that I was.” Congratulations, Mr. Alexie! The honor is much deserved.

 

Updike’s 1954 poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums” made the cut for the poetry volume, while his 1991 story “The Other Side of the Street” earned a place in the fiction volume. In the latter, a man returns to the small Pennsylvania town of his childhood to clean out his mother’s home and claim a few of her possessions. Both books are available from your favorite bookstores and retailers.

Are the days of males writing about fictionalized divorce angst over?

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Helen Brown, writing for The Telegraph, explained “Why men can’t write about divorce any more”: as Lyz Lenz summarized, “there is an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface.”

“Fifty years ago, it was men who dominated the divorce genre, often pouring their own domestic woes in novelistic form as an act of retribution. John Updike wrote 18 short stories about a fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple (later collected and published as The Maple Stories) who divorced in mid-life. . . . Philip Roth (who died in 2018) was famously accused ofpillorying his second wife, British actress Claire Bloom in his fiction.”

Read the whole article.

UNLV Library points students toward Updike

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The University of Nevada—Las Vegas main library has begun a series of online posts to promote reading and discovery of authors and books in the library, beginning with John Updike.

“Lied’s Reads: John Updike,” by Alberto Lorio, began by saying “Everyone wants to stumble onto something interesting. . . . For UNLV students of an intellectual kind of faith, Lied Library graciously rewards those looking to wander. Though there are many deserving places for a wanderer to begin stumbling, the first of Lied’s great reads highlighted here will be the work of American author John Updike. Writer George Saunders described Updike as ‘a once-in-a-generation phenomenon if that generation is lucky.”

“Updike was distinctly humanistic in his writing, exploring aspects of personal and social life in mid-century America. To him, writing was a sort of catharsis of the soul, one which came as spiritual release. It was a means of expression endemic to his meticulous observation: of individuals, of society, and of himself. . . .”

“John Updike’s legacy remains that of a poetic, class-conscious, sociological sentimentalist. His writing is sincere in its exploration—of the unifying, timeless eccentricity of being; of navigation in the labyrinthian strangeness inherent to our American lives.

“Students hoping to stumble into John Updike should look to wander in the American Literature section of the fifth floor of Lied Library.”

WSJ: Updike’s Rabbit provides a life lesson

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Writing on “Five Best: Life Lessons” for The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Wilkinson, author of Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire, shared five of the best life lessons he found in fiction. The first entry, from John Updike, came from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Is Rich (1981):

“The third installment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series finds Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom finally comfortable—or at least financially secure—amid the tumultuous backdrop of 1979’s oil crisis and stagflation. ‘How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?’ the narrator observes, capturing the novel’s eerie contemporary resonance: interest rates and real-estate climbing skyward—and staying there—and a gnawing certainty that the next generation won’t have it quite so good. Updike’s prose transforms the mundane rhythms of middle-class life into something approaching poetry as he excavates middle-class anxiety and success. Rabbit’s car dealership is printing money thanks to the Japanese vehicles he sells, even as his own prejudices and racial anxieties bubble beneath the surface. His son Nelson is adrift, the world seems to be coming apart at the seams and Rabbit’s own biases reflect the tensions of a changing America. The novel won Updike both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for its devastating precision in capturing what it means to ‘make it’ while watching the ladder get pulled up behind you.”

New Yorker at 100 revisits Updike’s ‘Hub Fans’

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The New Yorker celebrates its centennial in 2025 and the literary party is going on all year long. On March 9, Louisa Thomas wrote about the significance of John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which a subhead noted was “described as the best piece about baseball The New Yorker ever printed.”

Thomas wrote, “On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, ‘falling in love, away from marriage,’ took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base.
He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. ‘It was in the books while it was still in the sky,’ Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. Updike captured not only the ball’s trajectory and its monumental effect but also the moment’s mix of jubilation and relief.”
Thomas added that “it was Updike’s insight to see that everyone had expected [the last-bat home run], and in fact it was that shared expectation that held them in their seats. . . . So much of the best sportswriting since then bears the hallmarks of Updike’s example: an elegant, natural tone; precise, surprising descriptions; pacing that neither impedes the drama nor does too much to drive it.”

UK Times writer: Rabbit still stunningly good

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In an opinion piece for The Times (UK), Benjamin Markovits writes that he doesn’t remember reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Run when it first came out in 1960, partly because he was “suspicious” of the book’s popularity and was hesitant about such things as the “breathless present tense” of the narrative or the opening scene that has Rabbit knocking down a jump shot without even taking off his double-breasted jacket. “But then, just recently, I reread it and was stunned again by how good it is. The basic story hasn’t grown old either.”

“After a certain number of pages, you stop being aware of the medium of the prose and it starts to seem like the world. And the density allows Updike to do one of the hardest things for a writer to get away with, which is to make you (or at least, me) interested in the ordinary passage of his characters’ time. The hour spent, for example, hanging out with a couple Rabbit doesn’t particularly like at a bar, even if the stakes are low and nothing particularly dramatic happens. You start to feel like Rabbit, stuck in that time and place, and desperate to get out of it.”

Read the whole review article.