Category Archives: Reviews

Rabbit Is Relevant: a high school student’s review of Rabbit, Run

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In the Voices section of the April 3, 2018 Reading Eagle, Oley Valley High School freshman Wesley Martin offered a review of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, a book that, published 57 years ago, must have felt like a relic of the Mark Twain sort. But if Martin is any indicator of his generation, Updike’s celebrated second novel is still relevant . . . in a mixed-bag way.

“Rabbit, Run is difficult to get through at parts, but overall it is a thought-provoking and moving novel that I will surely read again as an adult,” Martin writes.

“The best aspect of the book by far was the writing style. Updike is an incredible writer. His descriptions of Rabbit’s dull, suburban word are usually clear and elegant, but sometimes he goes overboard. Most of the characters’ natures and motivations are well fleshed out and realistic, though I found many of the women to be one-dimensional.

“Though Rabbit is very unlikable, I found his struggle to find some kind of meaning in his adult life with his best days behind him very tragic and fascinating. Updike is excellent at making the reader feel sorry for a man who makes terrible decisions,” Martin writes.

In the words of this young man, the novel followed Rabbit “through a series of foolish, spur-of-the-moment decisions. It is an occasionally comical, often cringe-inducing story” because of the “treatment of women,” which Martin says was “very difficult for me to stomach.” Maybe that accounts for the B+ he gave the book, rather than an A. Here’s a link to the online version.

Moore comments on Updike

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The New York Times just published a review of Lorrie Moore’s collection of essays and reviews, See What Can Be Done, which included the acclaimed author’s review for John Updike’s early short stories.

As Dwight Garner writes, “Reviewing a collection of John Updike’s early short stories (she deeply admires them), Moore recalls that Updike said he left New York City because it was ‘overrun with agents and wisenheimers.’ She ushers in ‘a literary friend of mine’ to catch the vague aroma of anti-Semitism there. ‘Agents and wisenheimers,’ the friend asks. ‘Is that Shillington, Pennsylvania, for ‘Hymietown?’”

Moore’s “great feelers” for fictional works allow her to notice “the way ordinary friendship is largely missing from Updike’s work.” She also recalled Updike leaving New York because it was “overrun with agents and wisenheimers,” which her “literary friend” noted as emitting “the vague aroma of anti-Semitism.”

Updike’s name comes up more than once. In another reference, Garner writes, “Three panegyrics to Alice Munro are two too many. Upon arriving at the third, I thought of the older editor at The New York Times Book Review who said to me early in my tenure there: ‘If I have to read another thousand words about John Updike, I am going to hurl myself out that goddamn window.’”

He notes as well, “In her reviews of fiction (by Margaret Atwood, Joan Silber, Bobbie Ann Mason, Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin and Richard Ford, among many others), she has great feelers. She notices the way ordinary friendship is largely missing from Updike’s work.”

Read the full article here

The Poorhouse Fair: A retro review

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The county alms house was located just a few blocks from The John Updike Childhood Home, and it famously provided the inspiration for Updike’s first published novel. In a review of it, published in Commentary on March 1, 1959, David Fitelson wasted no time in pronouncing it a failure. His review begins,

“John Updike, one of the more talented of the New Yorker‘s resident storytellers, has had a hearty but not very successful try at a first novel. The failure of The Poorhouse Fair lies largely in its adherence to established New Yorker conventions regarded in many quarters as rather OK. One does not mind the OK archness and urbanity that occasionally creeps into Updike’s prose. He has a genuine way with words and usually rises above that. Other OK things, however, are more disturbing: in particular, a rather mannered way of exploring character, and a distaste-for-the-sight-of-blood daintiness that he shares with certain other New Yorker contributors (e.g., John Cheever and Harold Brodkey). Most disturbing is that New Yorker-like critical remoteness which enables one to be awfully aware of, say, the ‘ridiculous’ build-up in nuclear armaments, and then (having exercised one’s social conscience) to go on to chuckle at the ‘ridiculous’ oversight of an Iowa proofreader. In being aware of impending perils, one is relieved of responsibility for heading them off: in being aware of the existence of ideas, one is absolved from thinking about them.”

Here’s the full hatchet job.

Blast from the past: Atwood on Updike’s Witches

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Literary Hub recently posted Margaret Atwood‘s original 1985 review of The Witches of Eastwick:  “Margaret Atwood on Phallus Worship and Updike’s Bad Witches.” In it, she praised the book for its magical realism—a style, or genre, that has eluded American writers.

“These are not 1980’s Womanpower witches,” Atwood writes. “They aren’t at all interested in healing the earth, communing with the Great Goddess, or gaining Power-within (as opposed to Power-over). These are bad Witches, and Power-within, as far as they are concerned, is no good at all unless you can zap somebody with it. They are spiritual descendants of the 17th-century New England strain and go in for sabbats, sticking pins in wax images, kissing the Devil’s backside and phallus worship; this latter though—since it is Updike—is qualified worship.

After describing the book’s premise she writes, “This may sound like an unpromising framework for a serious novelist. Has Mr. Updike entered second childhood and reverted to Rosemary’s babyland? I don’t think so. For one thing, The Witches of Eastwick is too well done. Like Van Horne, Mr. Updike has always wondered what it would be like to be a woman, and his witches give him a lot of scope for this fantasy. Lexa in particular, who is the oldest, the plumpest, the kindest and the closest to Nature, is a fitting vehicle for some of his most breathtaking similes. In line of descent, he is perhaps closer than any other living American writer to the Puritan view of Nature as a lexicon written by God, but in hieroglyphs, so that unending translation is needed. Mr. Updike’s prose, here more than ever, is a welter of suggestive metaphors and cross-references, which constantly point toward a meaning constantly evasive.

“His version of witchcraft is closely tied to both carnality and mortality. Magic is hope in the face of inevitable decay. The houses and the furniture molder, and so do the people. The portrait of Felicia Gabriel, victim wife and degenerate after-image of the one-time ‘peppy’ American cheerleading sweetheart, is gruesomely convincing. Bodies are described in loving detail, down to the last tuft, wart, wrinkle and bit of food stuck in the teeth. No one is better than Mr. Updike at conveying the sadness of the sexual, the melancholy of motel affairs—’amiable human awkwardness,’ Lexa calls it. This is a book that redefines magic realism.

Later, she concludes, “Much of The Witches of Eastwick is satire, some of it literary playfulness and some plain bitchery. It could be that any attempt to analyze further would be like taking an elephant gun to a puff pastry: An Updike should not mean but be. But again, I don’t think so. What a culture has to say about witchcraft, whether in jest or in earnest, has a lot to do with its views of sexuality and power, and especially with the apportioning of powers between the sexes. The witches were burned not because they were pitied but because they were feared. . . .

“Mr. Updike provides no blameless way of being female. Hackles will rise, the word ‘backlash’ will be spoken; but anyone speaking it should look at the men in this book, who, while proclaiming their individual emptiness, are collectively, offstage, blowing up Vietnam. That’s male magic. Men, say the witches, more than once, are full of rage because they can’t make babies, and even male babies have at their center ‘that aggressive vacuum.’ Shazam indeed!”

On writers and reflections on birds

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In a review-article of As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Books and Birds by Alex Preston and Neal Gower that was recently published in the Financial Times (subscription required), John Updike merits a mention:

“The book is in 21 short sections, each based on a single species and the varying inspirations it has brought for previous authors, Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver and Kathleen Jamie to the fore, and, through them, for Preston himself. The style seems fey at first and the self-referencing somewhat clumsy, but the form is potent.

“Each section, from Peregrine to Peacock, Robin to Wren, is illustrated by the artist, Neil Gower. These pictures, most intensely of Swift (above right) and Waxwing, are alone worth the price of a book beautifully presented in matt orange cloth. A blue sky full of gulls introduces a poem by John Updike where the birds ‘stand around in the dimpled sand like those melancholy European crowds that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake of assassinations and invasions, heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.’ After the terrorist strike on London Bridge, we who were working nearby saw countless such gulls on the sands of the Thames and Preston, through Updike, reminds us that we did.

“Birds, more than mammals or fish, are the great reminders in literary history. An individual sight or song of a bird means most by bringing back the last time of seeing or hearing. Gulls gain added force for poets because they were for centuries the sole companions of sailors, the only life for men to observe in so much air and their only sharer of it.

“Those white clouds over trash pits today were once almost humans. Preston notes Updike’s glowing seaside conclusion in which ‘plump young couples . . . walk capricious paths through the scattering gulls, as in some mythologies beautiful gods stroll unconcerned among our mortal apprehensions.'”

Begley cites Updike in his new biography of The Great Nadar

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In his new well-reviewed biography, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, Updike biographer Adam Begley writes,

“I saw the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and Nadar instantly claimed a place in my private pantheon of great artists. But as John Updike observed in his review of the show, ‘Photography is a matter of time’—nearly twenty years passed before I tried to find out about Nadar’s life. The catalyst was Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, an unusual book, part essay, part short story, part memoir, in which Barnes briefly sketches the contours of Nadar’s curious career and irrepressible character. Thanks to Barnes, Félix charmed me, as he had charmed so many others. And so I went back to the photographs to look again.”

“The Great Nadar by Adam Begley — Kirkus Reviews: “A lively portrait of a photography pioneer who altered the cultural landscape of 19th-century France.

Amazon link

Prospect’s Edward Pearce on John Updike

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Prospect: The leading magazine of ideas, published an essay in their March 2000 issue (posted online 20 March 2000) by Edward Pearce titled, “You’re not so vain: In praise of John Updike.” In it, Pearce considers Updike-as-reviewer.

“Notoriously, the author of the Rabbit tetralogy, the delectable Bech stories and a compendium of superlative writing, is a kind reviewer. He shares the view of Anthony Burgess (also a victim of loftiness from below) that writing a book is a great toil underground and that to be smashed on the head afterwards—even with a cardboard shovel—is a rotten experience. Decent fellow writers should withhold such smashing.”

Later, Pearce writes, “Updike as a critic has the gift of interest. His scope is continental . . . . Updike is intelligently nostalgic. He is sufficiently independent of the arts community’s requirements to be able to field the latest buzz topic—then turn back to a film star of his childhood, or indeed a mediocre novel of 30 years ago, and write about it with affection.”

“There is also,” Pearce maintains, citing a review of Camille Paglia, “a delightful cross-over from Updike the moviegoer and 1950s nostalgist” in Updike the reviewer.

Read the full essay

Review: Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction

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Updike criticism over the past several decades has gravitated toward the Rabbit tetralogy. In Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017, cloth, 228pp.), Michial Farmer bucks that trend, leaving Rabbit out of his discussion entirely. Given Updike’s exhaustive (and exhausting) oeuvre, it’s no surprise that, despite the broad title, only a handful of novels make the cut for Farmer’s exploration of Updike and the imagination.

As the back cover note summarizes, Farmer “argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a necessary component of human flourishing, it also has a destructive, darker side, in which it shades into something like philosophical idealism. Here the mind constructs the world around it and then, unhelpfully, imposes this created world between itself and the ‘real world.’ In other words, Updike is not himself an idealist but sees idealism as a persistent temptation for the artistic imagination.”

In a first chapter, “John Updike and the Existentialist Imagination,” Farmer posits that while Updike “cannot endorse Sartre’s atheism or the nihilism that lurks just beyond his celebration of humanity’s radical freedom,” he nonetheless “uses Sartrean metaphysics as a jumping-off point for his own, more Kierkegaardian, reflections.” The fullest discussion of the latter remains David Crowe’s recent study, but for the intended purpose of this volume Farmer does a nice job of setting the stage for a study of the imaginative nature of Updike’s work, weighing Sartre’s suggestion that the human imagination, “and in particular the aesthetic imagination—can be a way to fight against meaninglessness.”

According to Farmer, Updike’s “job as a fiction writer” is to “use his powerful imagination, and the language that makes up its currency, to falsify the material world” that exists in opposition to the self and “bestow on it an order that does not properly speaking belong to it, but in bestowing that order to preserve and re-present it. The imagination thus counts among the highest and most important human faculties,” Farmer writes.

In the 15 chapters that follow, Farmer treats Updike’s works loosely chronologically but also finds a way to order them topically with the aid of a five-part section structure:

  1. The “Mythic Immensity” of the Parental Imagination
  2. Collective Hallucination in the Adulterous Society
  3. Imaginative Lust in the Scarlet Letter Trilogy
  4. Female Power and the Female Imagination
  5. The Remembering Imagination

Regarding what he calls the “parental imagination,” Farmer argues, “Mothers, in Updike’s early fiction, tend to create imaginative worlds for their sons to live in, and these worlds, when confronted with the world of mere things, tend to crush the sons for whom they were created.” That’s a big claim, and the chapters supporting it are probably the most enticing to consider, yet also the most elusive—especially when Farmer at times seems to conflate “force of will” with “force of imagination.” Still, his analyses of “Flight,” “His Mother Inside Him,” “Ace in the Hole,” “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “The Cats,” The Centaur, and Of the Farm are engaging.

The chapters themselves read like brief imaginative essays: a combination of scholarship and readability that’s well reasoned and written in such a way as to anticipate reader questions. As a result, the author, while discussing texts that would be familiar to most Updike scholars and aficionados, confidently proceeds without feeling the need to cite a tremendous amount of secondary sources—only those that seem necessary to him. Some scholars may see that as a negative. Nowhere near all of the secondary sources for Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, for example, are cited. Yet, underlying his arguments, Farmer demonstrates an awareness of the range of Updike scholarship throughout his chapter discussions, quoting from both the very first monograph (the Hamiltons) and the most recent one (Crowe).

Some of Farmer’s arguments have an “of course” feel to them, perhaps because the chapters’ arguments are compressed and proceed so methodically—with just enough theoretical grounding, contextual references, and examples from Updike’s works to lead readers to what feels like a foregone conclusion. Sometimes it’s a slightly new twist on familiar theory. For example, Updike’s oft-stated intent “’to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery,’ is,” Farmer writes, “in part a method of keeping the human imagination honest: we may not be able to have perfect access to the material world, but the material world periodically, perhaps even constantly, makes itself known by tearing down the imagination constructions we build on its back. The author’s fidelity to the world is thus held in dialectical tension with his imaginative project; the two are always in dialogue, and the human self is always moving between the two of them—forever building, forever destroying.” Mostly, it’s the attention paid to works that are too often ignored by other scholars that’s refreshing.

In the “adulterous society” section Farmer discusses “Man and Daughter in the Cold,” “Giving Blood,” “The Taste of Metal,” “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” “The Hillies,” Marry Me, and Couples; in addition to The Witches of Eastwick, for the section on female power he considers “Marching through Boston,” “The Stare,” “Report of Health,” “Living with a Wife,” and “Slippage”; and in the final section he draws on examples from Memories of the Ford Administration, “In Football Season,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” “Leaving Church Early,” and “The Egg Race,” in addition to the more frequently discussed “The Dogwood Tree,” “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” and “On Being a Self Forever.”

One of this book’s strengths is that does manage to reconsider old concepts in the pursuit of new, and to explore a satisfying range of critical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments without insulting the intelligence of those readers who might already know the terms and their meanings. That kind of writing is hard to pull off, yet the author manages to do so with grace. As a result, Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction is an easy read—one of the more engaging and accessible monographs on an author that I’ve encountered in recent years. It holds appeal not only for Updike scholars, but also for readers with more than a casual interest in Updike. This book helps readers to appreciate the sometimes erratic or unexplainable behavior of many of Updike’s characters, who live in worlds partially created by their own vivid and often conflicted imaginations.

Reviewed by James Plath

Witches of Eastwick film retro-reviewed

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You know a film still has currency when it sparks the headline, “The Devil is a F**kboy: Revisiting ‘The Witches of Eastwick,'” with the subhead “Thirty years later, George Miller’s diabolical feminist parable feels relevant as hell. Gird your cherries.”

Meg shields writes, “Miller is a man of many talents: he wrote Babe; directed its weird and wonderful sequel; helmed the academy award winning Happy Feet franchise; and even served as producer and second unit director on the Sam Neil-starring sailboat thriller Dead Calm. In 1983, in between Mad Max sequels, Miller directed a segment for the Twilight Zone movie, which saw a bug-eyed John Lithgow feverishly trying to shoot a gremlin off the wing of a commercial airliner. Enamoured by his experience with Amblin Entertainment, and with an adapted screenplay of a recent work by American literary treasure John Updike in his possession, Miller made the (admittedly rocky) move to Hollywood. And so, we were blessed with The Witches of Eastwick.”

“Darryl is, categorically, a shit lord: oozing with faux feminist sympathy as greasy and insincere as his joke of a ponytail. He’s the kind of guy who takes gender studies courses just to hit on women; a sneezy alt-bro who uses disingenuous ‘wokeness’ as a buff for disarming sexual conquests.”

“Eastwick’s is a hazy, effortless magic,” she concludes, “whose exposition takes a backseat to the joyous interplay and collective power of female friendship. To ask for extrapolation is to fundamentally misunderstand Miller’s focus: a very real examination of toxic masculinity and sexual power dynamics, couched, deliciously, within occult ambiguity.

The Poorhouse Fair reviewed in retrospect

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Fifty-seven years after Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published, it’s still attracting attention. Ray Greenblatt reviewed it last summer for the blog North of Oxford.

“Since John Updike’s oeuvres have come to an end, it is fitting to revisit his very first novel,” he writes.

“John Updike’s short novel of one hundred and fifty pages is equally divided into three chapters. Each chapter contains a dozen sections or more offering glimpses of the people and events at the poorhouse fair as it moves through the day. This kaleidoscopic effect is often intensified by certain fascinating techniques,” he writes.

“Some of Updike’s sentences are bedrock declarations, such as what products sold best at the fair . . . . Or unique personification . . . . Or pure fanciful imagery . . . .

“Late in the novel to underscore the pouring out of the long day and the jagged energy of those tending and attending the fair, Updike uses a stream-of-conscious[ness] method. . . ,” he adds, offering examples from the text.

“Reputations fluctuate. Hemingway, dead now a half-century, in the future might be known for:  a book on bull-fighting or big game hunting; a few stories still unique ninety years later; or A Moveable Feast, nearly an afterthought to him. John Updike has been a factory of endeavor:  two Eastwicks, three Bechs, four Rabbits just in the genre of novel. Will the multiple weights of these works dominate? Time will winnow literature, that and changing culture. Sometimes first is best; I firmly believe that The Poorhouse Fair will endure.”

Read the entire review.