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.

John Updike has been labeled a “protestant writer,” so it’s always interesting to hear what people of other faiths—especially articulate writers and inveterate readers—have to say about him as a religious writer. In “New Harmony: Another Brush with John Updike,” former Deseret News staffer and current Mormon Times and Faith page freelancer Jerry Earl Johnston shares his take on Roger’s Version . . . and a story involving the book he sent Updike for signing.

“After his death, one critic called him ‘The Mozart of American Letters.’ There was not only genius in his work, but also generosity and a buoyant spirit,” Johnston writes, adding, “I suspect those qualities came from his faith.”  Continue reading →

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, blogger William Thornton posted a reconsideration of Updike’s novel Terrorist: “will the events of last week and the coming weeks’ vindicate one of John Updike’s last, and least regarded, novels?”

“The Ghost of John Updike and the Boston Bombing” was posted on Brilliant Disguises: A Christian Look at Contemporary and Classic Literary Fiction and Culture on Sunday, April 21, 2013.

Among other things, Thornton concludes, “Updike’s depiction of the War on Terror has a disquieting moral equivalency between Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and America’s reaction about it, and that reads less charitably after an event like the Boston Marathon attack and the city’s response.”

Michael Updike writes that “to my delight and mild horror my son, Sawyer (17), came home with this sculpture that he commissioned from his friend, Ben Wickey. Ben is an aspiring claymation artist and just a high school sophomore. The sculpture is five inches tall and features miniature copies of Rabbit Is Rich and Picked-Up Pieces. Sawyer explained in youthful honesty, ‘I knew Ben was good at sculpting old people with all their wrinkles and white hair, so I thought he should do Grandpa, then I suggested we make him a rabbit.’

“I do think ‘Grandpa’ would be very amused,” Michael adds.

You would think so, given Updike’s own love of cartooning, his remarks on comics (“John Updike on Comics: a dream anthology”), and his approval of the late caricaturist David Levine, who drew him many times—at least once, with rabbit ears. When Levine died, the Boston Globe related Updike’s praise: “In a shoddy time, he does good work.”

Seeing the detail (and the humor) in this sculpture, one supposes he would say the same of Ben Wickey. Perhaps in the future this young artist might give the world its first claymation short film featuring Mr. Updike—with, or without the rabbit ears.    Continue reading →

Chicago-based blogger Levi Stahl recently posted an entry on Updike’s 1959 short story “The Happiest I’ve Been.”

He writes that “the first thing I did after reading it was make two copies to send to friends. It’s that good, full of sharp observations expressed in sentences whose every word seems diligently labored over, glowing with a sense that it was chosen through deliberation aiming at perfection rather than the logorrhea of chance.”

Read the full post at Ivebeenreadinglately.