Back in 1995, John Updike helped Updike scholar James Plath propose to his wife, Zarina, by inscribing a copy of his novel Marry Me: A Romance and postdating it to the day that Plath was to get down on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building on a trip to New York City. A recent Daily Mail story on British journalist, writer, and TV personality Piers Morgan revealed that he too used Updike’s book when he popped the question:
“Piers proposed on a romantic trip to Paris in 2009 by presenting Celia with a book by her favourite novelist, American John Updike, entitled Marry Me.
“Previously he claimed he was planning to use a video recording he had prepared of singer Stevie Wonder ordering Celia to accept his proposal,” but went with Updike instead—proving, perhaps, that the pen is mightier than the piano?
Now that it’s been revealed a celebrity has used the Marry Me gambit, will it catch on as a proposal prop?
Updike fans know the name George Hunt from his early monograph, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art, but Hunt was also an ordained Jesuit priest who served as literary editor and then editor-in-chief of America magazine for 14 years. The current editor, James T. Keane, remembers Hunt and his associations with people like Updike and former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent in an article that draws heavily from Jesuit Father Hunt’s own words.
You’ll want to read the entire article, which also has a link to the essay “John Updike” Suspicious of Santa but fond of Christ.” We’ll end this post with pullout quotes from the article:
“George Hunt: If it is true, as Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world in the image of his Son.”
“George Hunt: What kind of an earth shall we pass on to our children? Shall it be one in which the Word would wish to be enfleshed?”
“George Hunt: As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word in the announcement means: I love you. Our answer must be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I will be there at your party.”
Writing for a new Oxford University newspaper, The Oxford Blue, Nicholas Champness identified “Books That Made Me: Rabbit.” He of course was referring to Updike’s Rabbit,Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, collected together in the Everyman’s Library as Rabbit Angstrom.
First UK Edition
“The novels deal with a period of great change in American society. We see American change from the Eisenhower era, through the ‘Summer of Love,’ then Watergate, the Vietnam War, Reaganomics, and the Cold War. However, the focus of the novels is not on the great sweeping canvas of history and certainly not an influential figure. Rather, Updike presents us with history and politics as they affect a real person, someone totally ordinary with little claim to fame other than the provincial sporting prowess of his youth. The canvas of current affairs becomes the conversations had in the car en route to the ball game, opinions discussed curtly over the dinner table. Simply put, Updike shows how the ‘ordinary Joe’ reacts to these events,” Champness wrote.
“He draws his characters, rather than simply describing them. He makes them authentic and believable, imbued with nuance. Well-drawn female characters in the series can prove to be somewhat sparse, for which Updike has faced criticism. Yet, I wonder whether this is an issue,” Champness wrote.
“Rabbit’s mundanity and Updike’s decision that such mundanity is a worthy subject of literature invites the reader to reconsider. What is the point of literature and what is a worthy subject of it? What makes something beautiful or otherwise? Perhaps, then, we can understand Updike’s role as one of a mediator. He invites his reader to see the beauty in the ordinary,” Champness wrote.
“Updike’s treatment of life is one of the main reasons why I chose this series. Updike shows us that life and humans are much the same; they are both flawed and mundane, yet this is where we find beauty in them. I often find myself coming back to the ideas expressed here,” Champness wrote.
A guest columnist for the Daily Post Athenian [Tenn.] was inspired by Updike’s essay “Letter to a Baby Boomer” to write “a similar epistle to my former students, who now range between the ages of 30 and 45.”
Stephen W. Dick, a teacher at Athens Junior High School from 1989-2005 and a baby boomer himself, wrote that in Updike’s “Letter to a Baby Boomer” [re: those born between 1946-1964], “Mr. Updike, born in 1932 and writing to the generation following his own, simultaneously challenges and reassures us. Of course, addressing any generation in its entirety involves significant generalization, but thinking of us baby boomers, I believe we could largely agree on how we are perceived, even if individually we don’t fit those perceptions.”
“According to Mr. Updike, we baby boomers, in our youth, ‘went to Woodstock, experienced altered states of consciousness, protested Vietnam, fought in it, or both.’
“In our adulthood, he writes that we ‘invented yuppieness, health consciousness, and corporate greed.’
“That stings, especially the last. Time always erodes youthful idealism, but my generation didn’t give it time to erode. We abruptly abandoned it, citing spouses and/or children as rationales, as if the future we once imagined couldn’t include families,” Dick wrote.
“In his conclusion to ‘Letter to a Baby Boomer,’ Updike quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero who, upon retiring, feared that ‘Every third thought shall be my grave.’
“Updike suggests the first two thoughts should be these: (1) Love one another, and (2) Seize the day. Those, I think, are beyond amendment.”
“At 28, novelist John Updike got to the bottom of the Resurrection,” Simmons wrote. “Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of this surely led him to write “Make no mistake: if He rose at all / it was His body; / if the cells dissolution did not / reverse, the molecules / reknit, the amino acids reignite, / the Church will fall.”
“Updike realized that the scandal of the resurrection, that a human could raise the dead, had to be true or the faith had to be abandoned. He wouldn’t want to make a metaphor out of it or redefine it or make it less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had conquered it himself,” Simmons wrote.
Elle magazine’s Riza Cruz asked award-winning author and book lover Ian McEwan (Atonement, Lessons) to name favorite books in 18 different categories—a bit more fun than the usual Top 10 format. His non-annotated responses are below. For the Full Monty you’ll need to read the Shelf Life books column article . . . on the book that:
Made him miss a train stop: The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
Made him weep: Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
He would recommend: The Dead (James Joyce)
Shaped his worldview: The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer)
Made him rethink a long-held belief: The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)
He read in one sitting, it was that good: Youth (Joseph Conrad)
Currently sits on his nightstand: We Don’t Know Ourselves (Fintan O’Toole)
He’d pass on to his kid: God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens)
He’d gift to a new graduate: On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
Made him laugh out loud: The Bech Trilogy [The Complete Henry Bech] by John Updike. Bech is Updike’s Nobel Prize-winning, Jewish alter ego, whose literary career rises, nosedives, and rises again. By the end, Bech murders his various hostile critics and is heroically damned by a dying victim.
He’d like to turn into a Netflix show: We Had to Remove This Post (Hanna Bervoets)
He first bought: Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
He last bought: The Darkroom of Damocles (Willem Frederik Hermans)
Has the best title: What Katy Did (Susan Coolidge)
Has the best opening line: Herzog (Saul Bellow)
Has the greatest ending: Reunion (Fred Uhlman)
Everyone should read: Middlemarch (George Eliot)
Holds the recipe to a favorite dish: Appetite (Nigel Slater)
On September 18, 2022, Flashbak (Everything Old Is New Again) posted “John Updike On Death, Writing And the Last Words,” in which Paul Sorene gave some thought to Updike’s memoir and the relationship between the author’s preoccupations with writing and death.
“Memory is like the wishing-skin in fairy tales, with its limited number of wishes,” Updike wrote, prompting Sorene to wonder, “Can writing preserve memories and keep death at bay? Who gets to tell Updike’s story after he’s gone, and how will he be remembered?”
Sorene, quoting liberally from Self-Consciousness, noted that “Updike saved almost everything. His papers, stored at Harvard, include his golf scorecards [the John Updike Childhood Home has several of these on display], legal and business records [the JUCH also has his travel log, many of his cancelled checks, and a number of business correspondences with publishers], fan mail, video tapes, photographs, drawings [plenty of those on display at JUCH], and rejection letters. Was saving and preserving the past done so we could remember him, and he could better remember himself, and try again?”
That interesting question prompts another: What is the relationship between the collecting impulse, the writing impulse, and the impulse to somehow live forever?
The nearly 500-page novel, which mentions the fatwa against Rushdie, is “far longer than McEwan’s characteristically ‘short, smart and saturnine’ novels, as John Updike summed up in a 2002 review of Atonement,” Allardice wrote. “McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which ‘global events penetrate individual lives,’ of which the fatwa was a perfect example. ‘It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,’ he says.”
“Billed as ‘the story of a lifetime,’ it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. ‘I’ve always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels,’ he explains. ‘I thought, now I’m going to plunder my own life, I’m going to be shameless.'”
“‘I’ve read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards,’ he explains. ‘If you read Doris Lessing’s cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.'”
Asked whether, at age 75, he worries about his legacy, McEwan responded, “I’d like to continue to be read, of course. But again, that’s entirely out of one’s control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But I’ve had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they haven’t reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, ‘Start worrying about your legacy because it’s not looking good from here.'”
Allardice wrote, “He was greatly saddened by what he describes as ‘the assault on Updike’s reputation’; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. ‘Those problematic men who wrote about sex—Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.'”
“We’ve become so tortured about writing about desire. It’s got all so complex,’ he says. ‘But we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether it’s Flaubert you’re reading or even Jane Austen.'”
In “Rereading: Couples by John Updike review—a melancholy anatomy of adultery,”David Mills began, “John Updike’s 1968 novel Couples has a notorious reputation: it is regarded as a sex book, an explicit manual of swinging high jinks in the ‘post-pill paradise’ of the early 1960s.” He conceded, “There certainly are passages that come across as route-one porn” and provided examples, but took exception with David Foster Wallace’s well-known description of Updike as “just a penis with a thesaurus.”
Within Couples‘ “five-section structure, one unconventionally focuses entirely away from the main character of Dutch builder Piet Hanema, and the prose itself can be tricky, with Piet given stream-of-consciousness interior monologues of almost Joycean complexity.
“Above all, this is a novel about sexual dynamics that in its choreography of shifting relationships becomes a melancholy anatomy of adultery,” Mills wrote, with this qualification: “Of course, it is a white, phallocentric novel with moments of racial stereotyping and casual male violence that make us blench now, but if its social attitudes and assumptions haven’t aged well, then neither have Jane Austen’s.”
Read the full review published in The Sunday Times [UK].
In an August 16, 2022 blog entry, Patrick T. Reardon stepped into his wayback machine and reviewed Updike’s most famous novel from the mindset of a 21st century “essayist, poet, literary critic and an expert on the city of Chicago.” Reardon, who has written about his Catholic faith and was a longtime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, began,
“At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away. Later, he is running to—to the hospital. At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the unknown.”
Reardon broke the novel into three acts, with the first ending when Rabbit hooks up with his old coach Marty Tothero and the prostitute Ruth. The second section “opens two months later and covers Rabbit’s life with Ruth, a life abruptly fractured when Janice goes into labor, Rabbit runs to the hospital in Brewer and moves back in with his family, now with a new daughter Rebecca June. The third section, much shorter, just 37 pages, has to do with tragedy. And it ends with Rabbit wandering away from a cemetery and then, in ‘an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic,’ breaking into a run.'”
“As I was working my way through the first section of Rabbit, Run,” Reardon wrote, “I was puzzled that anyone would want to read so much about a guy who seemed aimless, selfish and irresponsible. By the time I finished the book, I was far beyond such puzzlement. I wanted to know what happened next to Rabbit and immediately ordered a copy of Rabbit Redux.”
“As for Harry Angstrom, I came to find him compelling for the same reasons I initially found him distasteful. Rabbit is an existential Everyman who is searching for a life that’s equivalent to the feel of taking a shot and seeing the basketball go in through the ‘high perfect hole,'” Reardon wrote.
Reardon concluded, “When Rabbit runs, it seems that he is fleeing. But that’s not exactly true. Neither is he running toward something. He is, throughout Rabbit, Run, grasping for, searching for, yearning for a ‘high perfect hole’ of meaning. . . . But it can’t be found. So, like the instinctual young child who is filled with feelings and desires for which there is no language, he leaves behind the mental and the emotional and opts for the physical. He runs.”
