Category Archives: First Person Singular

New Yorker Cartoonists blogger spills the contents of their Summer Library

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For his August 16, 2022 post at Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin began,

“For the past twenty-seven summers, my wife, Liza Donnelly, and I have gone to the same Downeast home, and over those years, have built a small library of books, some New Yorker-centric (but many having nothing to do with the magazine).” Depicted in the photo are “most of the books either brought here or bought here at library book sales.”

“Occasionally,” Maslin confessed, “I take a book back to New York,” depriving their growing summer library of the volume—such as James Thurber’s The Seal in the Bedroom, which flippered back with them last year at summer’s end.

“The titles by Liebling, Benchley, Capote, Beattie are like good friends,” Maslin wrote. “I enjoy seeing them, being around them. Adam Begley’s Updike biography came up with us this year. I’m on my third read through, visiting parts I just had to experience again (last night I re-read the part about Updike driving into Manhattan to meet William Shawn for the very first time, but having to delay the meeting by a day because he (Updike) got lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey). Someone should do a collection of pieces about Updike driving. About a decade ago, at a library sale up near the Canadian border, I found a first edition of Updike’s Rabbit, Run (still dust-jacketed) for about 75 cents. That too went back to New York to sit on the Updike shelf.”

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Julian Barnes echoes Updike’s love of books, with greater optimism

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From a recently published piece by Julian Barnes on “Books, Books, Books” that was a version of a speech delivered at Christie’s, London “to mark First Editions, Second Thoughts, an auction of annotated first edition books and works of art from internationally renowned contemporary artists and authors, in support of English PEN”:

“I have been a book reader, a book buyer, a book sniffer, a book collector and, in recent times, a regretful book discarder,” said Barnes, who also quoted American Anglophile essayist Logan Pearsal Smith: “Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Barnes added, “This is funny and wry, but in my view entirely wrong. Reading isn’t something you do when you’re not living, or when life has let you down, or you are incapacitated in some way. Nor is reading just a part of living. Reading is living, and only reading fully explains what this thing called life is.”

Recalling Updike, Barnes asked, “And what of the Future of the Book, that question much posed in recent times. The physical book, that is. John Updike, in a late poem, ‘The Author Observes his Birthday, 2005’, wrote lovingly of his early years of being a writer and of seeing ‘my halt words strut in type’. He goes on:

“[…] And then to have my spines
line up upon the shelf, one more each year,
however out of kilter ran my life!

“I too remember that feeling, though in my case it was more like a book every two years. In the same poem, Updike writes with melancholy – indeed pessimism – of the future of the printed book:

“A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? The printed page
was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder.

“I am much less pessimistic. Book-buying, as we saw, went up during lockdown. The appetite for the physical book appears undiminished, perhaps even increasing. The physical book is, as someone else might put it, the perfect piece of delivery equipment for what it contains – words, pleasure, truth. But I’m sure I don’t have to convince any of you of that.”

Lethbridge Herald writer sees mixed messages in Updike’s The Coup

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In the Lethbridge Herald [Canada], Trevor Busch wrote, “Today’s Africa is finally a reawakening giant” that “seems increasingly ready to join a family of nations as developed and free societies.

“In the early 1970s, things were much different. Africa was a wild west of cowboy diplomacy as both the Soviet Bloc and the United States faced off in numerous African backwaters over ideological differences, with both sides arming their own ideologicallly-friendly regimes in a deadly game of Cold War cat and mouse.

“Unfortunately freedom—no matter what side of the political spectrum Africans found themselves under these various regimes—was an unintended casualty of proxy warfare.

“American novelist John Updike stepped into this maelstrom with The Coup (1978). Set in a fictional sub-Saharan African nation known as Kush during the early 1970s, it follows the struggles of dictator Col. Ellellou in attempting to prevent a pro-Western coup from sweeping him from power and instituting a style of government and economy he most hates.”

Busch added, “While The Coup closely follows events in Africa involving Col. Ellellou and his failing regime, it also serves as a scathing rebuke of American Cold War foreign policy in Africa, and is illustrative of the contradictions and hypocrisy that were inherent in both superpowers propping up tin-pot dictators in the name of freedom. . . . Through the hybrid character of Ellellou, Updike takes the reader on a journey that exposes the best and worst of 20th century Africa as well as America.”

“Although Ellellou is nothing if not a fascinating character . . . it tends to beg the question how he attained power in the first place, something which Updike mostly side-steps in the novel.

“Other characters in The Coup are sometimes almost laughingly one-sided, especially women, who serve almost no purpose for Ellellou other than sexual concubines for his satisfaction. . . . While Updike’s The Coup is a fascinating exploration of how late 20th century Americans viewed their nation’s own foreign policy choices through the viewpoint of a hostile but perceptive outsider, the novel falls entirely short of greatness.

“The reader is left wondering if The Coup is meant to be an abstract polemic or a realistic tale of a violent change of government in a poor African nation.”

Or perhaps a third possibility that seems to resonate with American readers: That it’s a comic novel, a satire of American over-consumption and arrogance, as well as a satire of the African dictators caught in the middle of all these Cold War shenanigans?

NPR story on climate change quotes Updike

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Scott Simon on NPR’s Simon Says today opined that “Blistering summers are the future,” and backs that up with equally frightening claims from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization: “there is more lethal heat in our future because of climate change caused by our species on this planet. Even with advances in wind, solar and other alternative energy sources, and international pledges and accords, the world still derives about 80% of its energy from fossil fuels, like oil, gas and coal, which release the carbon dioxide that’s warmed the climate to the current temperatures of this scalding summer.”

“The WMO’s chief, Petteri Taalas, said this week, ‘In the future these kinds of heatwaves are going to be normal.’

“The most alarming word in his forecast might be: ‘normal.’

“I’m of a generation that thought of summer as a sunny time for children. I think of long days spent outdoors without worry, playing games or just meandering. John Updike wrote in his poem, ‘June’:

The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,
And long green weeks
That never end.
School’s out. The time
Is ours to spend.
There’s Little League,
Hopscotch, the creek,
And, after supper,
Hide-and-seek
The live-long light
Is like a dream…

“But now that bright, ‘live-long light’ of which Updike wrote, might look menacing in a summer like this.

“In blistering weeks such as we see this year, and may for years to come, you wonder if our failures to care for the planet given to us will make our children look forward to summer, or dread another season of heat.”

Reviewer cites Dickens and Updike for cheerfulness

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In his review of Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History by Timothy Hampton, The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw adds a few cheerful-related references that aren’t mentioned in the book . . . but, one gathers, should have been.

One such reference is the BBC wartime radio comedy It’s That Man Again—or ITMA—which “kept British peckers up during the blitz,” a “morale-boosting cavalcade of wacky characters, cheeky catchphrases and proto-Goon sound effects, in which depressed charlady Mona Lott, played by Joan Harben, would drone the latest awful thing that had happened to her and then hit you with the devastatingly deadpan punchline: ‘It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.'”

Bradshaw writes, “Like Michel Foucault discussing the history of sexuality, Hampton proposes a history of cheerfulness that is not about the sunny character trait of the individual, which it’s possible to find enviable or annoying, but the unexamined social and cultural practice. It is a learned discipline, to be taken perfectly seriously as something that promotes cohesiveness and personal humility. He finds Friedrich Nietzsche to be a key figure in the history of modern cheerfulness. While not obviously Mr Cheerful, the philosopher was someone who rejected the idea of it as mere placid wellbeing” and Hampton “finds in Nietzsche’s ideas an important link with gaiety as a life-force, an apparently trivial but in fact vital component of what drives us to create and to achieve, and also to live fully and responsibly in maintaining the happiness of others.”

“Cheerfulness is a perennially uncool value,” Bradshaw writes, “something to be satirised as a symptom of sinister unexpressed anger. And yet in the real world it is part of that unassuming habit of politeness without which social interaction is impossible. Cheerfulness is never saying die, a key component of Dickens and also, I would say, (though he isn’t mentioned here) John Updike.”

NY Times book critics put 2021 in the rear view mirror

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It has come to our attention that an end-of-year article, “Times Critics Discuss 2021 in Books, From Breakout Stars to Cover Blurbs,” managed to invoke John Updike in the process. Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, Jennifer Szalai, and Molly Young were asked questions about the book scene. Here’s one exchange:

“Molly and Alexandra, you both started as book critics for The Times in September. Any all-time favorite books of criticism that you would recommend people delve into over the holidays?

“JACOBS: John Updike’s Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs are the bookends of my Updike Shelf (about which, another time). Here was someone who didn’t have to review or consider his contemporaries or predecessors, and yet industriously, prolifically did. What generosity.

“YOUNG: Martin Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché. His flow is insane.

“JACOBS: Wait, I meant to say that! Well, Amis has written about Updike and Updike about Martin’s father, Kingsley, so maybe this is a male literary turkucken . . . . “

Stutterer’s story invokes Updike’s

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Amy Reardon wrote a personal essay about her stuttering that can help illuminate the world of other stutterers—including one she invokes: John Updike.

In an essay called “Stuck” written for Culture.org’s “The Believer Logger,” Reardon begins by describing a moment of verbal paralysis that strikes her in a business setting at the age of 29.

Reardon continues, “John Updike attributed his stuttering to a ‘deep doubt’ in the ‘dead center of one’s being.’ In his memoir Self-Consciousness, he elaborated, ‘It happens when I feel myself in a false position.’ Updike listed all the situations that made him stutter. When he felt ‘in the wrong.’ When he was with ‘people of evident refinement or distinction.’ In the presence of law enforcement. In the company of men. And last, total heartbreak, what happened to his ability to speak to his children when he divorced their mother and moved away. He’d always been fluent with them before, he wrote, but now, ‘their cheerful unblaming voices over the phone… summoned into my presence now by appointment and invitation, put a stopper in my throat.’”

Reardon talks about two types of stutterers—”baby” stutterers who are repeaters, and those who are “so pained by our struggle that we swallow the repetition and fight silently. When I’m blocked, my lips are sealed, trembling from the pressure inside. This creates long, awkward silences.”

Later, Reardon returns to Updike in describing an interview opportunity with a legendary comedian: “I prepared my questions, pulled my best reporter buddy into the one office at the paper with a phone and dialed. My old enemy loomed. I started bravely because I never know if the words will pass, and often they do. But feeling unworthy in the face of celebrity (remember Updike’s false position) my throat seized wildly. By question three, I could not squeeze out a word. I handed the phone to my friend and pointed to my notebook. She read the questions into the phone, and together we listened, one ear each at the receiver while I took notes. After it was over, we giggled. We both got to interview Bob Hope, and he never noticed. Yay.”

Read the whole essay.

An Alberta professor on Circling Around and With Rabbit, Run

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We have stumbled across a new critical essay (emphasis on the critical)—“Nights of the Lepus: Circling around and with Rabbit, Run by John Updike”—by Alberta University of the Arts professor Christopher Willard. It begins,

“In an early review of Rabbit, Run David Boroff of The New York Times  wrote, “The author’s style is particularly impressive; artful and supple, its brilliance is belied by its relaxed rhythms. Mr. Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase catches the light. The prose is that rarest of achievements—perfectly pitched voice for the subject” (Boroff, 1960). But Updike’s noticing and skewing of details is by far less than the  whole of his novel, although this   is the aspect upon which many critics dwell. Updike can recognizably follow Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant” but just as frequently his relaxed rhythms and details are neither here—furthering the story along with necessary thoughts by Rabbit, nor there—lapsing into a full stream of consciousness carried by linguistic brilliance as found for example in Durrell’s  Alexandria Quartet.

“The tension inherent in allowing passages to hover in a middle space without commitment to one or the other intent is at times frustrating but that said, Updike deserves praise for a masterwork in free indirect discourse of which in my view we can never have enough examples. Then again, flip side, at his blandest, Updike comes off like the Alex Katz of writing, the darling of those who prefer style like warm Cheez Whiz so it oozes down their throats without too much conscious swallowing.”

Clearly not a fan, Willard, who was born in Maine and has written several works of fiction himself, concludes,

“Elevating the mundane is an art, Robbe-Grillet comes to mind or Céline, and then a whole host of stream of consciousness novels flow into this river. Updike never went to these places in  Rabbit, Run. When his writing tends toward a stream of consciousness, he engages the damper.  When the writing starts getting too internal he brings it back to the detail. He never wants, it seems, to let the writing take him where it might or must take him, instead he continually forces it back to the method, and it’s a strong method, although his reliance on it could earn him the nickname ‘The Stephen King of a Great Literary Modernism.’ I think too of the band Boston,  with a groundbreaking first album and a remainder of an oeuvre comprised of pastiche, or of Jackson Pollock who ended up doing parodies of Pollocks where the flame of unadulterated engagement between one’s soul and the world seems cast off for method and form.”

A few examples to back up the claims would have been nice.

What author cracks up Jerry Seinfeld? Would you believe John Updike?

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An interview with comedian Jerry Seinfeld that originally appeared as a New York Times “By the Book” interview turned up on a number of sites, including a blog by Jack Limpert, editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years. Here are some of the exchanges:

Asked if he reads much fiction, Seinfeld said, “When I used to read more, I really loved John Updike and John Irving. Updike, to me, was insane. I love microscopic acuity and I thought he was untouchable in that: the fineness, and the smallness of things that he would describe so well.

What was the last book that made him laugh?

“I don’t really laugh reading books,” Seinfeld said. “It’s pretty hard to laugh when you’re reading—the written word is tough. I mean, the Updike stuff is funny to me. You know, describing the circles of water under someone’s toes when they get out of the pool. That makes me laugh more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

Which three writers, dead or alive, would he invite to a literary dinner party?

“Well, Updike I mentioned. I think David Halberstam would be a great dinner guest. And I’m into this Marx Brothers thing now, so I would like to sit with this guy [Robert] Bader for dinner. And Lincoln! I consider him to be a great writer.”

What does he plan to read next?

“I’m out of stuff, but along the same lines as John Updike I might give Nicholson Baker a shot.”

Read the whole interview.

When it comes to fatherhood, writer says Rabbit is no model

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With another Father’s Day in the rear-view mirror, if anyone contemplated what makes a good dad, chances are Harry Angstrom didn’t come up in conversation as an exemplar. He certainly didn’t in Oliver Munday’s personal essay on “The Book That Captures My Life as a Dad,” which appeared in The Atlantic, June 17, 2022. That honor was reserved for Abbott, the professor-dad hero of Chris Bachelder’s novel Abbott Awaits. Abbott, the father of a two year old, husband of a pregnant insomniac, and “confused owner of a terrified dog,” doesn’t run. He somehow “endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.”

Munday writes, “Many dad books are presented as guides, memoirs, or clever manuals; and though most have useful advice, they rarely succeed in rising above their function. Early fatherhood, when portrayed in literature, is often similarly practical: serving to color the characters, plot, and themes, but rarely warranting a sustained look. Take John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which charts the struggle of a restless young father who abandons his family. By the time Rabbit returns home, later in the novel, the chances of him proving himself as a father are tragically lost. All of which is to say: Fathering, as depicted in these books, is usually not artful, subtle, or consoling. Abbott Awaits is the antidote.”

Yes, but how’s his golf game?