Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies recently published a useful bibliography of “Best American Essays 1986-Present,” and of course it includes John Updike:
Best American Essays index lists Updike publications
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Category Archives: Lists
Art-matters story cites Updike
In a story posted in the travel section of The Australian on 29 April 2017, author and former manager of Art Gallery of NSW bookshop Brian Turner observes, “Art museums are a favorite mise-en-scene for novelists’ storylines and denouements.” He cites Dan Brown’s popular Da Vinci Code novels as an obvious example, but includes others as well and concludes by offering a reading list for traveling “museum obsessives”:
“In-flight reading while returning home? Museum obsessives should relish the last chapter of The Museum of Innocence for [Orhan] Pamuk’s exotic small museums listing—Proust’s house in Illiers-Combray in central France; Paris’s Musee Edith Piaf; New York’s Glove Museum and Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe House. Also read John Updike’s short story, ‘Museums and Women.’ Updike met his future wife in a museum and assures readers they offer the opposite to what we seek in churches, but you must decide for yourself.”
Read the full article: “Galleries and museums set the scene in fiction and real life.”
Literary Hub includes Updike in birth control “history”
Ellen Feldman offers “A Brief Literary History of Birth Control from George Orwell and John Updike to Grace Metalious and Alice Munro” in an article posted 23 March 2017 at Literary Hub. The entry on Updike credits Rabbit, Run as a touchstone:
“Rabbit Angstrom of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, has an aversion to contraception, but unlike Orwell’s character, he objects to it on physical and aesthetic rather than political grounds. When Ruth Leonard, the ‘hooer’ to whom he’s giving fifteen dollars ‘toward [her] rent,’ is about to slip into the bathroom to insert what he calls a ‘flying saucer,’ he stops her with the argument that he’s ‘very sensitive.’ ‘Do you have the answer then?’ she asks. ‘No, I hate them even worse…If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this,’ Rabbit, who has abandoned his pregnant wife and child, goes on, ‘give me the fifteen back.’
Couples is also cited: “Eight years after the publication of Rabbit, Run, Updike not only espoused birth control but also identified it by brand name. The first time Piet and Georgene, married to other people, have sex, he worries about ‘making a little baby,” and she’s surprised he doesn’t know about Enovid. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ she tells him, and the ‘light-hearted blasphemy . . . immensely relieved him.'”
With only nine entries you’d have to call it a very brief history, but it’s still a fascinating round-up.
New book analyzes writers’ tendencies
Scholars and would-be writers just got a resource that’s so fascinating they might not be able to get past the data to formulate a thesis of their own. In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt combines statistical analysis and literature to produce a study that quantifies writers’ tendencies. As an article from Publisher’s Weekly notes, “Using a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, Blatt answers everything from what are our favorite authors’ favorite words to which contemporary writer uses the most clichés to the controversial topic of adverb usage.”
The article “Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers” shares some of his findings, and of course Updike turns up on the lists.
Which three writers use the least amount of exclamation points per 100,000 words? That would be Elmore Leonard with 49 in 45 novels, followed by Ernest Hemingway with 59 in 10 novels and John Updike with 88 in 26 novels. Who uses the most exclamation points? James Joyce with 1105 in 3 novels, followed by Tom Wolfe (929 in 4 novels) and Sinclair Lewis (844 in 19 novels).
Which three writers use the least number of clichés per 100,000 words? Jane Austen (45 in 6 novels), Edith Wharton (62 in 22 novels) and Virginia Woolf (62 in 9 novels). Purveyors of the most clichés in their writing? James Patterson (160 in 22 Alex Cross books), Tom Wolfe (143 in 4 novels), and Kurt Vonnegut (140 in 14 novels). Updike was rated as producing 96 per 100,000 words over the course of 26 novels, which was one better than Toni Morrison did over 10 novels and six better than Twain did over the course of 13 novels.
What about the weather? Danielle Steel mentioned the weather in the first sentence of her 92 novels a whopping 46 percent of the time, followed by John Steinbeck (26 percent), Nicholas Sparks (22 percent), Willa Cather (21 percent), Stephen King (17 percent), Nora Roberts (16 percent), Tom Clancy (15 percent), Edith Wharton (14 percent), Janet Evanovich (10 percent), Charles Dickens (10 percent), D.H. Lawrence (8 percent), John Updike (8 percent), and Mark Twain (8 percent).
Rabbit, Run in the running for Britain’s favorite 2nd novel
The Royal Society of Literature is polling people to discover Britain’s favorite second novel, and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is in contention.
“In selecting the books for the voting list, we have used the following criteria:
- Each book is the second full novel published by its author (not necessailry the second novel the author has written). Novellas, collections of short stories and any non-fiction works are not counted.
- The writers may be living or dead and may come from any nation.
- The books may have been written in any language, but must be available in English. The second novel judgement is based on order of original publication, not order of publication in translation.
- Novels written by members of the RSL Council, or by the RSL’s Presidents and Vice-Presidents, have been excluded, as have all the novels entered for the 2017 Encore Award.
- We hope that the voting list overall includes a varied and fascinating range of novels. We realise that lots of great novelists are missing from the list – usually because we felt that their second novel is not well-known or accomplished enough to attract many votes. We apologise in advance for any glaring omissions – and look forward to hearing your views.”
Here’s the link to the story and the Society’s Facebook page, where discussions are taking place.
The tough competition includes:
Pride and Prejudice
Fahrenheit 451
The Plague
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
The Awakening
Oliver Twist
The Mill on the Floss
The Scarlet Letter
Their Eyes Were Watching God
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Shipping News
The Crying of Lot 49
The Fountainhead
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Ben-Hur
The House of Mirth
and, ironically, Infinite Jest . . . by Updike hater David Foster Wallace.
Writer offers Brief Survey of the Great American Novel(s)
You’ve heard the debate. Probably participated, as well. Is there a Great American Novel?
Emily Temple, writing for Lit Hub, takes readers back to 1868 when John William DeForest “coined the now inescapable term ‘the great American novel’ in the title of an essay in The Nation—a term he defined as representing “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” DeForest thought that the Great American Novel hadn’t been written yet, but since his early speculation there’s been no shortage of “contenders.”
Temple assembles a list of the usual suspects plus a few unique ones, among them (of course) John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (or rather, the collective Rabbit tetralogy). She blurbs each entry with a learned quote. For Updike it’s one from Troy Patterson written for Slate in 2009: “To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you’d be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.”
Other contenders on Temple’s non-exhaustive list are:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
U.S.A., John Dos Passos
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Light in August, William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
These Dreams of You, Steve Erickson
The Flame Throwers, Rachel Kushner
Updike turns up in NYT Year in Reading retrospective
“In this season of giving,” a Dec. 19, 2016 New York Times Book Review post began, “we asked some notably avid readers—who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors and artists—to share the books that accompanied them through 2016.”
Not all the books in “The Year in Reading” were published in 2016, and Updike appeared on two lists:
—Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame, includes John Updike: The Collected Stories on a list of “works most enjoyed or valued, in no particular order,” while
—Writer Maxine Hong Kingston lists books in the order in which she read them, including Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies.
What Updike books have you read in 2016, or do you plan to read in 2017?
Updike called “the voice of the middle class”
In an essay on books written for Signature: Making Well-Read Sense of the World, Keith Rice contemplates “American Pastoral and 9 Novels of Suburban Desolation,” among them Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, the four-novel collection:
“John Updike is arguably the voice of the middle class and suburban angst and his Rabbit series is his master-stroke. Over the course of four novels, Updike traces the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a onetime high school basketball star coming to terms with his adult life while trapped in loveless marriage and the confines of a boring sales job. Two of the four Rabbit novels (Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) were Pulitzer Prize winners.”
Other volumes that made the list (“novels” is a misnomer):
Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
Ordinary People, by Judith Guest
The Dinner, by Herman Koch
The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker
Little Children, by Tom Perrotta
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
Great writers on writing list includes Updike
Updike was as prolific as he was critically acclaimed and popularly successful. He also gave a lot of interviews, so it’s no surprise that his name turns up on a compilation of “Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers,” posted on the brainpickings blog by Maria Popova.
Updike pops up twice:
63. John Updike: Writing and Death
“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”
70. John Updike: Making Money, How to Have a Productive Daily Routine, and the Most Important Things for Aspiring Writers to Know
“In a country this large and a language even larger . . . there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.”
Harry Angstrom makes Bad Dad list
This past Father’s Day Electric Lit came out with a list of bad dads, and, no shocker, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom made the top . . . or rather, bottom 10:
“Janet Angstrom made our list of Worst Mothers in Literature, but that doesn’t mean that Rabbit isn’t an equally terrible husband and father. He’s a washed up ex-high school basketball star who can’t deal with adulthood. He abandons his family, knowing full well that his wife is struggling as a recovering alcoholic, and has an affair. Selfish and immature, Rabbit contributes to the sad fate of his family just as much as his wife.”
Joining Harry on the list are Humbert Humbert (Lolita), Alexander Zalachenko (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series), James MacNamara (Down by the River), David Melrose (Never Mind), Jack Torrance (The Shining), Glen Waddell (Bastard out of Carolina), Eugene Achike (Purple Hibiscus), Culla (Outer Dark), and Old Nick (Room).