After reading Louis Menand’s review of Updike, the writer of a blog titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science jotted down his reactions and thoughts—most of which revolved around Updike, O’Hara, and Menand’s sin of omission (not mentioning O’Hara).
Here’s the link: “Updike and O’Hara”
On the blog First Things, Stephen H. Webb considers Adam Begley’s biography and charges, “Begley portrays Updike as a man who could not stop writing and as a writer who could not stop thinking about himself. For Begley, in fact, Updike comes across as America’s first (and finest) blogger.”
But he adds, “Begley does not get to the heart of the man because he does not grasp the soul of his faith.”
Moreover, Webb writes, “Without getting to the heart of what he most cherished in his personal experiences, Begley’s Updike comes off as a grandiloquent and compulsive chronicler of his own thoughts and actions.”
Webb adds, “That the meager theological fare of liberal Protestantism was still enough to prompt people like himself to gather regularly just to say thank you to God was perverse evidence for Updike that the modern world still left room for miracles. In fact, gratitude was so important to him that I would call it the sum of both his piety and his art, and I don’t know how anyone can read his work in this era of resentment and entitlement without feeling grateful for him.”
Today Whispering Gums, a blog devoted to books and such, posted a review of John Updike’s short story, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd.”
“I love the complexity of this,” the blogger writes, “the fact that Updike has chosen to tell this story through decidedly subjective eyes, and yet has managed to leave the interpretation surprisingly open. It’s a story, I suspect, that can be read very differently depending on each reader’s experience and point of view, despite some givens in the text.”
“John Updike, The lovely troubled daughters of our old crowd (Review)”
If you’re following Adam Begley on Twitter you already saw this, but today the Updike biographer tweeted his recently unearthed mini-review of Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius from Vol. 53, No. 14 (April 10, 2000) titled “Picks and Pans Review: Gertrude and Claudius”:
“It is winter in Denmark, in the soon-to-be-haunted castle of Elsinore, which, we are told, sits in a “foggy hinterland, where the sheep look like rocks and the rocks look like sheep.
“To Bleat or not to bleat? In this ingenious prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, National Book Award winner John Updike dazzles with plenty of wordplay before the swordplay. Instead of fussing with a clever plot that dovetails with the Bard’s, Updike tells a simple love story and offers brilliantly nuanced portraits of two characters Shakespeare merely sketched—Queen Gertrude (Prince Hamlet’s mom) and King Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle turned wicked stepfather). This is a new perspective—that of a middle-aged queen falling for her husband’s darkly mysterious younger brother. Tragedy broods in the wings, of course. But for the space of this short, sly novel, the guilty couple share sweet romance. (Knopf, $23)
Bottom Line: Rich remaining of classic characters
Contributors: Paula Chin, Kim Hubbard, Adam Begley, Ralph Novak, Mike Neill, Kyle Smith, Debbie Seaman.
In a review that was published in The Tennessean on May 31, 2014, Amy Stumpfl wrote that the world premiere of the Blackbird Theater stage adaptation of Roger’s Version “captures Updike’s intoxicating brand of intellectualism and moral ambiguity with aplomb.
“Written and directed by Blackbird Artistic Director Wes Driver, this engrossing adaptation pits a self-satisfied divinity professor named Roger Lambert against Dale Kohler—an evangelical grad student who believes he can prove God’s existence through computer science. . . .
“Fairly heady stuff, to be sure. But don’t be intimidated by all the intellectual wordplay. Like most of Updike’s work, ‘Roger’s Version’ is firmly rooted in the physical world, taking on everyday issues of professional rivalry, resentment, sexual urges and marital discord.”
Here’s the full review. Below are photos of David Compton as Roger and Kristopher Wente as Dale, Wente with Corrie Miller (Esther Lambert) and Amanda Card, “the unlikely object of Roger’s guilty lust.” The photos come courtesy of Greg Greene, Managing Director for the Blackbird Theater. Continue reading
In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.”
That led her to take exception with Updike’s “irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:
“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”
In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”
Of Updike, they wrote:
“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”
The Telegraph has come up with a list of “The best books of 2014—The must-read novels, memoirs and history books released in 2014 so far.” In the category of biography, Adam Begley’s Updike made the cut with a five-star (out of five) rating, flanked by biographies on Updike’s literary frenemy Philip Roth, T.E. Lawrence, British politician Roy Kenkins, and Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor.
“Begley’s biography shows just how closely and relentlessly Updike mined his own life for fiction,” the editors write.
Charles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:
“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.
“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’
“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”
But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.
Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.
It’s not on the Internet, but thanks to David Lull we have a transcript of an early review of the UK version of Adam Begley’s Updike:
“Beautiful dreamer.” Jenny Needham. Northern Echo [Darlington (UK)]. May 5, 2014. 42.
Adam Begley provides the ideal companion to the life of writer John Updike
Non-fiction Updike by Adam Begley (Harper [pounds]25, eBook [pounds]25)
“For the second half of the 20th Century, John Updike bestrode the world of US fiction as the definitive man of letters. His best novels—notably the Rabbit tetralogy—invited comparison with the greats of the 19th Century.
“Effortlessly prolific, absurdly versatile and almost invariably wordperfect, his output included more than a dozen novels, around 100 short stories (many lodged with the New Yorker, his spiritual home), several hundred book reviews (ditto), collections of light verse, and writings on golf, art and all sorts of miscellaneous topics.
“He was the sort of writer who could turn even a frivolous magazine commission into a text of lasting beauty. Yet for all the prizes and adulation, he originally hoped to make it as an illustrator, and secretly wished that people took his serious poetry more seriously.
“In Adam Begley, Updike has a biographer worthy of his talents. A fine writer in his own right, Begley is empathetic but not uncritical, and organises his story thematically—golf, infidelities, travels abroad etc—rather than follow a strict chronology.
“Begley is a close reader of the texts, adept at teasing out both pointed literary insights and the biographical parallels between the life and the fiction. These, it turns out, are almost embarrassingly easy to find: adultery in the suburbs, the death of parents, the character of his children, the travails of being a grandparent. . . Updike ruthlessly pillages his and his loved ones’ personal lives for material.
“For me, the first two-thirds of the book could not have been bettered.
“But the final sections, detailing Updike’s late writings and death, have a disappointingly foreshortened feel.
“All in all, though, if you love Updike you’ll absolutely love this book.”
Note: To read the online reviews of Updike collected thus far (which now number 59), click here.