John Updike Society member Haruki Takebe wrote that his essay, “The Apocrypha of The Maples Stories: John Updike’s Fe/Male Points of View Reconsidered,” was published in the most recent issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

The journal has allowed the author 50 free downloads, so if you’re among the first to click on this link you can read the article compliments of the author and Critique.

ABSTRACT

John Updike’s notorious penchant for using the male point of view should not be attributed to the author’s alleged misogyny; on the contrary, his careful handling of male and female perspectives deserves close re-evaluation. After tracing how the young Updike struggled to incorporate a female point of view in his early fiction and, for a time, settled on employing a male perspective in his mid-career stories of Richard and Joan Maple, this essay revolves around a female-voiced story “Killing” (drafted in 1975 and published in 1982), scrutinizing its publication history and the archival materials associated with it. As a result, we see that the story demonstrates Updike’s successful attempt to explore a woman’s interiority as well as shows an example of his subtle craftsmanship, involving his use of the pronoun us at the sto-ry’s dénouement. Moreover, “Killing” foreshadows Updike’s female narratives in his late phase, especially Seek My Face (2002), where the similar technique is extensively utilized to portray two women’s incompatibility and their following reconciliation.

The past two years have seen a huge jump in online classes, with an equally large number of asynchronous courses and assignments. You can watch/listen to Dr. John Pistelli‘s interesting lecture on Updike and “Separating” on YouTube. It’s part of his English 1201W: Contemporary American Literature course that was offered spring 2021. “Separating” is the Updike story included in the main textbook for the course, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E: Literature Since 1945, Ninth Edition. Pistelli says that he doesn’t “care much about” the story—”I don’t think it’s Updike’s best work.”

Pistelli calls Updike a polarizing writer—you either love him or you don’t. “I actually like Updike, so I understand the critiques of him.” Pistelli considers Updike a “lyrical realist” and asserts that there’s “no critique in Updike”—that everything is described more or less without judgment being passed. He also sees in Updike a tendency towards sentimentality and what he terms “a laziness of intellect” that helps to explain the response of critics who see Updike as a stylist without much to say.

Pistelli is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Modern British and American fiction, history/theory of the novel, Modernism, and fiction writing.

Writing for Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer considered the literary output of John Updike and Philip Roth, who were born almost exactly one year apart and were equally prolific throughout their extended writing careers.

“Both published acclaimed works of fiction in their 20s: Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, which satirized postwar Jewish affluence, and Updike’s Rabbit, Run, in which a former high school jock with a two-digit IQ (but, for unexplained reasons, the supreme perceptive consciousness of John Updike) repeatedly makes bad decisions that bring trouble for everybody around him. Yet, Rabbit keeps turning out okay because, hey, America is more of a comedy than a tragedy,” Sailer writes.

“In the early 1970s, Roth published some lousy books, such as his strident Richard Nixon parody Our Gang, while Updike pulled ahead in repute.”

Sailer decides that the two writers were close to equal early in their careers, with Updike the superior writer in mid-career and Roth the better late-career writer. And he has the charts to illustrate those assertions. Here’s the link.

Two papers on John Updike were presented at the Fourth International Conference on “National Myth in Literature and Culture” hosted by Kazan Federal University in Russia, May 6-7.

Professor Olga Karasik’s paper, “Russia through the Eyes of American Author: John Updike’s ‘Rich in Russia,'” focused on the mythologizing of the image of the Soviet Union, and Ph.D. student Olga Shalagina’s paper, “The Image of Terrorist in John Updike’s Terrorist,” was devoted to the image of the terrorist as “other.”

It has come to our attention that the critical essay “Black Activism: John Updike” by Suchitra Vashisth, an assistant professor at DIT University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, was published last year in the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (Vol. 3, Issue 1; Jan.-Feb. 2018).

“As a a literary artist, he has given us most powerful expression of the American racist society,” Vashisth writes, adding that “Rabbit Redux contains the story of the black revolution in America in the nineteen sixties. Updike reveals, through the speeches of Skeeter, black revolutionary, social injustices with the blacks in American society” and paraphrasing Richard Locke’s assessment that “the wide range of tones and rhythms in black speech has never been so well produced in contemporary white writing.”

Vashisth concludes, “The remarkable thing which is depicted here in this novel is a white failure of nerves or at least a flagging sense of white identity in the face of black assertiveness.”

Here is the link to the entire essay.

Updike’s portrayal of Islamism in Terrorist has generally been praised, but a dissenting voice appears in “The (Mis)Representation of Islam in John Updike’s Terrorist,” a critique by research scholar Abdul Haseeb, Dept. of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, U.P. India that was published in IJELLH, the International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities.

His abstract:

In the post 9/11 literary scene there occurred an increased number of publications of novels that discussed the various types of Islamism (Political Islam) and have explored the complex relationship between the West, which is proud of having a secular world, and the East, especially the Muslim world, accused of fostering religious terrorism against the secular world. It is not surprising to find a long list of such novels as it is the general perception that the 9/11 attacks are the outcome of the complex relationship between the West and the Muslim world. These novels pick Islam as their subject showing its implications on both the people of the West and the Muslims themselves who are introducing Islam to the West, or they choose one or a group of Muslim youths who carry a fundamentalist ideology of their religion and dare to counteract the godless, materialistic West. The present paper is a modest attempt to expose how John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) has projected Islam as the root-cause of terrorism and its teachings as the springhead of extremist ideology.

Here is the link to a link to view the full paper.