Category Archives: Reviews

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike reviewed

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Kathleen Verduin has written a review of John McTavish‘s Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought, calling the book “a kind of bricolage: revisions and expansions of essays and reviews McTavish published since the 1970s in such venues as Theology Today, the United Church Observer, and the Huntsville Forester; reprints of articles by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton from the Christian Century and Radix; an interview with Updike appearing originally in the magazine Episcopal Life; previously collected memorial tributes by the poet J.D. McClatchy and Updike’s son David; and a selection of reminiscences solicited from various readers of Updike . . . about how they first encountered the author and why he attracted them.

“Still, it seems to me that such an anomalous makeup makes this a publication of interest. Looked at on its own terms, McTavish’s book bears witness to half a century of authentic engagement with a writer he calls ‘one of the few literary links with the historic Christian faith’—and thus provides a diachronic record of Updike’s reception . . . among literate Christians exhilarated by a gifted artist who, as Michael Novak wrote in 1963, was ‘beginning to make religion intelligible in America.'”

Read the full review.

If you missed it: David Foster Wallace’s famous slam on Updike

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Literary Hub today reminded readers of the late novelist David Foster Wallace‘s famous attack on John Updike and “the Great Male Narcissists” in his 1997 review of Toward the End of Time, published originally in the Observer. In fact, they posted the entire review, in case you missed it.

In his review, Wallace begins, “Mailer, Updike, Roth—the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”

Toward the End of Time Wallace calls “the worst” of the 25 Updike books he’d read to date, “a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”

In the same review he talks about literary readers he knows and admits they are all under 40, and “none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason—mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back: ‘Just a penis with a thesaurus.'”

Sounds like penis (with a thesaurus) envy. Read the full review.

Are cigarettes and golf transcendent for writers?

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A book review of Gregor Hens’s Nicotine written for The Atlantic begins,

“Writers have long found rich fodder for their work in their leisure pursuits. John Updike, writing about golf in The New York Times in 1973, described the pastime as ‘a non-chemical hallucinogen’ that ‘breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria.’ Sketching out a particularly lucid paragraph about the act of preparing for a stroke, he confessed, ‘got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed.’

“Updike’s experience of transcendence while playing golf—his sense of tapping in to a kind of acute concentration that alters perception—is echoed vividly in the German writer Gregor Hens’s new memoir of sorts, Nicotine,” reviewer Sophie Gilbert writes.

Nicotine, she says, “enters a kind of sub-genre of literary memoirs focused around a single practice or obsession, in which the object or activity enables the writer to achieve sharper focus, heightened consciousness, and creative fire. Like Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Updike’s writing on golf, it illuminates the writerly quest for the elusive state the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi named, simply, ‘flow.’ Smoking, Hens seems to believe, transformed him into a writer by expanding his sense of what was real and what was perceivable. It physically and irreparably altered the pathways in his brain. And it punctuated and constructed the order of his professional life.”

Read the full review.

Sportsblogger reviews Rabbit, Run

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Rabbit-RunRESIZED-280x393Rabbit, Run has been reviewed hundreds of times, but this one—posted on Sportsblog January 5, 2017—is a little different:  “Book Review: Rabbit, Run, by John Updike; Running in Israel.”

Or, rather, not running. As the author writes, “In Rabbit, Run, the protagonist’s method for dealing with feeling trapped is to run away. In my case, not being able to run has been among the chief factors contributing to my feeling trapped.

“It was a rough December for Jerusalem—cold, wet and dark. . . . Early in the month I missed almost a full week of work with what might have been pneumonia or bronchitis—probably weather-induced. . . . The whole rest of the month the respiratory issues lingered, making it difficult to sleep and to function in general,” the author writes.

“Very little running was going on all this time. Winter had like a battering ram broken through my defensive fortifications, work held me prisoner in my chamber, and there they gave me Rabbit, Run to read, to gnaw away at my spirit from within.

“John Updike’s 1960 novel is that powerful. It spreads through the reader like a tea bag in hot water. Consciously, I didn’t like the first half; yet the story had seeped into the seedbed of my subconscious, where it settled, established itself, germinated, grew. I felt it there during the day, felt Harry Angstrom’s character moving, doing things, haunting like a ghost. I read on without enjoyment, annoyed, frustrated, but also strangely captivated, drawn in against my will.”

The author found Rabbit, Run depressing enough to Google “cheerful novel” in order to have “something encouraging to look forward to after Rabbit. Alas, what I ended up reading was The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, an infuriatingly bad book that somehow won a Pulitzer in 1973.”

The author concludes, “Rabbit, Run gets four stars. If it weren’t for that quagmire of a first half, it would be a must-reread.”

Review of The Violet Hour cites Updike

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VioletHourKatie Roiphe included John Updike in her book The Violet Hour, so it’s no surprise that a review of that book would cite Updike, as Shirley Hershey Showalter did for The Christian Century. In “Death’s call and our response,” published October 2, 2016, she writes,

“Kalanithi uses a quotation from Montaigne as an epilogue: ‘If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.’ The quotation could apply to Katie Roiphe’s book also. The Violet Hour takes up Montaigne’s challenge but with less confidence in the outcome. Roiphe roiled cultural waters in the 1990s withThe Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism. The Violet Hour defies genre, mixing memoir, journalism, biography, and literary criticism as it ponders the dying of six writers—Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, James Salter, and Susan Sontag.”

Later, she writes, “Updike is the only practicing Christian in the group. His lifelong devotion to the Book of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Church present a puzzle to Roiphe. She’s not tripped up by the apparent contradiction of his adulteries; she has a special interest in his linking of adultery and immortality: ‘I have a soft spot for those who try to defeat death with sex.’ It’s irony, not sex, that makes it difficult for her to understand Updike’s religious life.

“She explains in an endnote that Updike’s biographer Adam Begley helped her see continuity where she could only see confusion. Updike’s final book of poems, Endpoints, includes these lines about clergymen: ‘comical purveyors / of what makes sense to just the terrified.’ Roiphe settles on this explanation: ‘Updike approached everything under the sun with irony, including his deeper passions, his beliefs, his sources of marvel and awe.'”

Here’s the full article.

Great Writers at the End book includes Updike

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VioletHourNew from The Dial Press is The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, by Katie Roiphe, who, as a New Republic review-article notes, “explores the final days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, and other writers at the end.”

Of the book, William Giraldi writes, “Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant rigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper.

“Each chapter, skillfully eliding overlap, constitutes a ‘biography backward, a whole life unfurling from a death.’ In the slow fade of her five writers—cancer came for Sontag, Freud, and Updike; a stroke felled Sendak; Thomas decimated himself exuberantly with drink—Roiphe finds ‘glimpses of bravery, of beauty . . . of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion.'”

“Roiphe flashes her richness of mind most intently on Updike,” Giraldi writes. “In Updike’s work, ‘one is struck not by the glittering seductions of the sharp, ambitious, sexually enthralling mistresses but by the deep, agonized love the husbands feel for the first wives.’ She commands a supercharged insight into Updike’s religio-sexual realm that many critics, female and male both, are too ideological or outright painterly to muster. . . .

“Whole swaths of Updike’s work are ‘about not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep, cheating, tricking, denouncing it, protesting it, fixating on it; so much involves the hope for more than our animal walk, an afterlife, or, better yet, more life.’ His unkillable buoyancy of language, his style that pursued every contour and lineation of living: No other major American novelist has been so downright delighted by the tensile strength of English, no one else so wedded to the notion of writing as deliverance. . . .”

Here’s the full review-article. The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

Commonweal staff picks Updike Selected Poems

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Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 8.38.20 AMOn a blog post from Commonweal‘s Rand Richards Cooper we get “Staff Picks: The Poetry of John Updike.” John Updike: Selected Poems was one of his 2015 favorites.

“A book I’m glad to have read this year. . . . It brings me back to a day thirty years ago, when I took a bus out to Seton Hall University to hear Updike read. In a smallish lecture room he stood behind a lectern and, in a quiet voice adorned with the slightest lisp, he read . . . poems. The audience was surprised and perhaps a bit restive. Turns out Updike had agreed to do the reading only on the condition that it be poetry and not prose,” Cooper writes.

“Like his prose, Updike’s poetry—much of it written in variations on the sonnet—highlights his skill in noticing the world, and his life in it, in trenchant and surprising ways. The poems convey wry humor, exquisite attentiveness to daily life, and an abiding preoccupation with mortality and time.”

 

Blogger takes exception with Selected Poems review

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On The New Yorker & Me blog, a writer posting under the moniker “Capedrifter” was bothered enough by Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker review of Updike’s Selected Poems that he penned a rebuttal.

Capedrifter thought Chiasson’s review inconsistent and questionable (and in this, he’s probably not alone). “Yes, it strongly recommends the new Selected Poems . . . And yes, it calls ‘Endpoint’ ‘a perfect sonnet sequence.’ But it also says things like, ‘The problem is that all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him, and we don’t associate cheer with great poetry,’ and ‘Updike’s poems level our intrinsic ranking of occasions’ and ‘Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.

“These are questionable criticisms,” Capedrifter says, then proceeds to disprove all three criticisms by citing excerpts from the Selected Poems:

“In Praise of John Updike’s Poetry (Contra Dan Chiasson)”

Retro review: Blogger praises The Witches of Eastwick

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WOEOn November 3, 2015, Jason Fernandes posted a retro review of The Witches of Eastwick, the book he read years ago as an introduction to John Updike, on his blog, Rants & Raves.

“From the opening pages of The Witches of Eastwick, I was immediately put to mind of Pride and Prejudice. That might sound like a strange connection to make,” he writes. “Whether this is just a coincidence or Updike is consciously having some fun with the reader is something I cannot say. Neither would surprise me. But it did give me a warm first impression and the sense that I was in for a treat. . . .

“The prose is exquisite. I have been fed on mostly contemporary fiction in recent years, and even the ‘modern classics’ I have read have not impressed me greatly. This novel was a welcome return to a higher class of writing,” he writes.

“Book Review: The Witches of Eastwick”

 

Updike mentioned in Beerbohm review

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Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 8.25.56 AMJohn Updike gets a brief mention in Adam Gopnik’s review of a new New York Review of Books Classics anthology of Max Beerbohm‘s work “with the unfortunately patronizing title The Prince of Minor Writers.”

Updike, he reminds us, had written the introduction to a previous N.Y.R.B. Classics reprint edition of Beerbohm’s Seven Men.

Full story:  “The Comparable Max; Max Beerbohm’s cult of the diminutive”