Writing for Literary Hub, Thomas E. Ricks shared what it was like “Growing Up Inside a John Updike Novel” in the “Shadows at the Edge of Updike’s Work.”

Ricks said his first word—”boat”—was spoken “about the time that John Updike was moving into a small house a few miles to the north of Essex.”  But, “It was only recently, when reading Adam Begley’s biography of Updike, that I realized how much Updike and I breathed the same disconcerted air in those years. . . . Updike’s beaches were my beaches—Crane and Wingaersheek, both located between Gloucester’s rocks and Ipswich’s marshes. As newlyweds, Updike and his first wife had worked at the YMCA Family Camp on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, while my family around that time spent a week of the summer at Squam Lake, the next body of water to the west.”

“When old and wealthy, Updike spent some of his royalty payments golfing at the venerable Myopia Hunt Club, where my grandparents sometimes took me to dinner when I was a child,” Ricks writes. And getting even more into the territory of family myth he says, “My mother told me that once at a cocktail party, Updike poured a drink down the front of her dress. She was not sure if it had been on purpose.”

The writer considers how “At one point in Couples, one half of an adulterous couple contemplating having sex on a pile of dirty clothes in a basement laundry room in a house on the outskirts of Ipswich looks up at the cellar window to check if a ‘child’s watching shadow cleft it.’ I would have been seven years and eight years old in the year in which the novel is set, from early 1963 to early 1964. That might have been my shadow there,” he muses.

Read the full essay.

You’ve got to love a blog that’s titled Coming Up Millhouse, especially when the “about” section begins with a Homer J. Simpson quote:  “Maybe, just once, someone will call me ‘sir’ without adding, ‘you’re making a scene’.” And especially when the blogger posts an entry on “Reading The Classics – ‘Rabbit, Run’.”

“In 2019, myself and a friend sat down to form a pseudo bookclub,” Derrhn writes. “Our goal: to read the classics we are yet to get round to. We started with John Updike’s debut novel, Rabbit, Run.”

“I can’t exaggerate how much I enjoyed this book,” Derrhn says. “If you’ve ever read Catcher in the Rye or On the Road and felt frustrated about how the respective protagonists’ abandonment of responsibility goes unpunished, then Rabbit, Run is the book for you. Updike explicitly explores the disaster left behind when someone chooses to run away. Rabbit’s futile attempts to fill the vague sense of something missing leads to: death; loneliness; a loss of religion; and sexual impotence. In many ways the book reads as a direct confrontation of the hypocrisy inherent in the burgeoning hippie counter-culture of 1960s America.

“The pleasure of reading Rabbit, Run stems from the paradox at its heart. Harry is both ‘running’ to find something, anything that might make him feel complete whilst simultaneously running away from a truth that scares him—that his life peaked in high school.”

Well Sir, that assessment seems spot-on to us.

In the May 20, 2019 National Review, Peter Tonguette wrote a review of the Library of America release of John Updike’s first four novels that wasn’t terribly positive. Dean Bevan, Professor Emeritus of English at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kan., responded with a letter to the editor (excerpted here):

“Mr. Tonguette capably examines the Library of America’s volume containing Updike’s first four novels and rightly questions some of the quirks in his early writing. But the review leaves the reader with an unbalanced and somewhat unfair impression of Mr. Updike, focusing on the growing pains of his early career (‘written in a windy, pretentious style’) and including such statements as ‘He thought of himself as a man of the Left.’

“I can’t answer for how John Updike thought of himself, but I can say, after reading and teaching his novels for several decades, that he was without question one of our country’s most conservative writers of fiction, and its best. He questions the views and the avatars of the Left and admires conservative ideas, in novel after novel, and it is likely that he was denied the Nobel Prize because of this (as he guessed), while lesser but more progressive talents received it.

“As the reviewer observes, Updike took ‘the measure of the world as it really was.’ Himself a painter, he once observed that the most important painter of the 20th century was Norman Rockwell, because he followed the tradition of the masters in representing life as it was lived in his own time. How unwoke is that? And it would seem that Updike meant to do the same thing in his writing. . . . America has had relatively few conservative writers—T.S. Eliot comes to mind—and we should celebrate the great ones we have had, such as John Updike.”

Included with the letter’s publication is a response from Tonguette, who says “I agree with Mr. Bevan’s characterization of John Updike as one of the great contemporary conservative writers.”