Library of America published John Updike: Novels 1959-1965 last November in what amounted to a quiet reissue of the author’s first four novels: The Poorhouse Fair; Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; and Of the Farm. What few reviews that emerged have been almost as ambivalent as those from when Updike first began publishing. Only the “charge” is different. Then it was “He writes like an angel but has nothing to say”; now it’s “Misogynist!”

In his PopMatters review, “Approach ‘John Updike: Novels 1959-1965’ with Indulgence, Patience, and Caution,” Christopher John Stephens acknowledges that Updike was “a formalist, a structuralist, a fantabulist, a writer as steeped in Nathaniel Hawthorne as he was in the pleasures of golfing and the baseball majesty of Ted Williams.” Then the ambivalence starts to seep in: “He wrote some of the most stilted and painfully clumsy bad sex in his ’60s novels and some of the more stunning evocations of longing and regret ever seen in the mid-20th century American white male.” The Poorhouse Fair, he writes, is an “impressive debut. It’s also a hard novel to enter or even like,” while he calls The Centaur “another novel burdened by the yoke of significance”—that “Updike knows his Greek myths, and reading this carefully balanced story is less enjoyable than admirable.”

Later in his review Stephens assesses Updike’s prose style: “Nothing is inherently wrong with these passages. They’re just too precise, too tightly wound.” And regarding Rabbit’s behavior in the first book of the tetralogy, he says, “Updike can’t have it both ways. He can’t be condemning a heartless misogynist while primarily entertaining us by making Rabbit the ping pong ball bouncing between his ‘virgin’ wife mother of his child (Janice) and ex-prostitute girlfriend (Ruth).”

Stephens concludes, “Overall, the reader should approach this volume with equal parts indulgence, patience, and caution. The first should be applied to Updike’s youthful flowery prose and apparent need to impress with each line. The second should be applied to Updike’s tendency to painfully stretch out descriptions in clinical ways. As for the third application, caution, that applies to the carefree racism and horribly misogynistic undertone to the sex scenes and ongoing gender war. Caution can be easily applied, but forgiveness might take more time from even the most patient reader.” Yet he gives the book a 7 on a 10-point scale.

In an assessment written for National Review, “John Updike saw the World as It Was,” Peter Tonguette considers those same four early novels and concludes, “As this collection of his early novels emphatically establishes, Updike was that rare writer whose strength was not in allowing his imagination to wander hither and yon, but in keeping his eyes fixed on what was right in front of him.”

Although Tonguette praises Updike’s “level-headed precision” and calls Rabbit, Run a “dazzling opening book of what evolved into a much-honored tetralogy,” he does write that “stunts mar more than one early Updike work. The Poorhouse Fair–a well-crafted novel that revolves around the denizens of a poorhouse–unaccountably takes place not in or around the year it was written but decades down the line. . . . More unsatisfying still is The Centaur,” with its contemporary story of a father and son “augmented by references to Greek mythology, notably the half-human, half-horse title creature, written in a windy, pretentious style.” Not surprisingly, he calls Of the Farm “the most satisfying offering included here” because of its “careful account of sights and sounds and smells” and concludes, “In the years to come, the Library of America plans to release the balance of Updike’s novels. The best of them are more akin to the earthbound Of the Farm than to The Poorhouse Fair or The Centaur, with their strained, fantastical conceits.

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.”

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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.