In an opinion piece for Baptist News, David Ramsey contemplated “Atheism and agnosticism: The last closet,” which began,

“In 1996, John Updike released his 17th novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, a story about a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, who loses his faith, leaves the ministry and becomes an encyclopedia salesman. In a strange case of art imitating life, Updike was narrating my story. I was a Baptist minister who had slowly been losing my faith. That same year, I left the ministry and embarked on a second career in technology sales.

“While Updike captured my painful but liberating movement from Christianity to agnosticism, he failed to narrate the stigma and stereotypes associated with being an agnostic or atheist,” Ramsey wrote.

“Last year, I wrote a book in which I discuss my journey from minister to agnostic and critique popular religious notions like ‘everything happens for a reason.’ I have friends who have reviewed my book online, some of whom masked their names to avoid being outed by their association with a controversial topic and agnostic writer,” Ramsey said.

Read the whole opinion piece.

In an article titled “Times Critics Discuss 2021 in Books, From Breakout Stars to Cover Blurbs,” new critics Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs were asked if they had any all-time favorite books of criticism that they would recommend people “delve into over the holidays.”

Jacobs replied, “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.”

When Young weighed in with “Martin Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché. His flow is insane,” Jacobs said, “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 turducken . . . .”

Shortly before The John Updike Society convened in Reading, Pa. for their 6th Biennial Conference, Jonathan Clarke published a piece in City Journal titled “John Updike and the Politics of Literary Reputation.” In it, he assesses the current problem: Updike’s fall from literary grace during a time of “cancel culture” and the #metoo movement.

“His is a striking case study in the politics of literary reputation in a time of generational upheaval,” Clarke writes. “Updike has not been a victim of cancel culture. He merely represents the ancien regime.”

Clarke suggests that “Updike’s self-effacing public manner now looks like a tactical error in the long game of literary reputation. Philip Roth and Toni Morrison never tired of singing the song of themselves—and why not, in the end, when the world is so crowded and busy? It’s not that Updike was modest about his talent; it’s simply that he embodied the cultural style we associate with American Protestantism. The vanquishing of that once-dominant mode has contributed to a growing incomprehension of Updike’s work.”

Read the whole article.

Of course, questioning Updike’s status as a writer of stature is nothing new. Those who have followed the critical response to Updike’s work will think immediately of John Aldridge’s early claim that Updike might be a great stylist but that he “has nothing to say.”

In 2014, The New Republic took up the issue again in a debate between English comedian, novelist, and TV personality David Baddiel and literary critic-biographer Jeffrey Meyers: “John Updike: Tedious Suburbanite, Literary Great.” Prompting the debate was the release of the Adam Begley biography, Updike.

Baddiel argues on the “for” side. He begins, “Let’s begin by making one thing clear. John Updike was the greatest writer in English of the last century. Unquestionably, he was the best short story writer; I would argue the best novelist, certainly of the postwar years; one of the very best essayists and in the top 20 poets.” On the negative side, Meyers calls Updike’s New Yorker contributions “made-to-order” and dismisses the magazine entirely as a group of editors and contributors who engaged in “mutual admiration” and “quarrelled over a semicolon but encouraged facile content and ironed out all traces of distinctive style.” Meyers concludes, “Updike, cherishing every scrap of his personal life and striving for mythical significance in his daily doings, fell back on the trivial and tedious details of his small-town childhood.” Ironically, in his biography of Hemingway, Meyers doesn’t take that author to task for mining his own adolescence to create a series of stories set in Michigan, or later stories and novels that also reflect Hemingway’s lived experiences. So maybe it all comes down to a long-debated aesthetic question: what is a suitable subject for art?

In recent years, males who have taken advantage of women have been toppled amid cries of “toxic masculinity,” and Confederate statues and monuments have been removed because of “cancel culture.” But in his Spectator essay “Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled,” associate editor Ron Liddle questions whether the backlash against writers for alleged sexism or racism isn’t somewhat like pushes from the other side of the political arena to ban books from school libraries. His essay raises other questions: Should writing about a fictional man who abuses women or spouts racist things be treated the same as a flesh-and-blood man who abuses women or says racist things? Can a male write about a misbehaving male protagonist? Should a writer be held accountable for a character’s behavior? When it comes to art, is censorship ever justifiable? If so, when, and under what circumstances? And what about inconsistencies? Why are older novels that feature sexist male protagonists not held in the same contempt as those from a more recent past? Is “cancel culture” driven by personal crusades?

Although Liddle focuses on Bradbury, Updike also factors into the discussion. “Frankly, it’s a wonder we are allowed to read [Bradbury] at all. But that’s where Fahrenheit 451 got it right. After reading Bradbury I moved on to Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike — especially Updike, another small-town writer. These people seemed to me giants of literature and yet I suspect you will have to search high and low to find them on a university syllabus, so comprehensively have their reputations been trashed for political reasons.

“Updike, an almost lifelong registered Democrat, is loathed for his supposed misogyny and racism,” Liddle writes. “I read an academic article recently supposedly in support of Updike: it said he should be read because we needed to know what a vile bastard he really was. Saul Bellow is canceled because he became a bit gamy about the neighborhood gangs in Chicago, and also for Henderson the Rain King and Mr Sammler’s Planet, which are considered terribly racist. And Philip Roth? Hell, even his biographer has been canceled. Maybe we ought to memorize a book or two from each of these wonderful writers, in order to keep the memories alive. I’ll take Updike’s Couples, if that’s OK — I already know most of it by heart. It’s late now. There’s a wind whipping up and the distant sound of thunder carrying the whiff of autumn. I am no longer 15 years old. But I might still hunker down between my sheets with Bradbury, comforted by the tales of the weird and ominous stuff going on just outside.”