Category Archives: Scholarship & Analysis

Updike included in aging masculinity in the American novel study

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been out for a year, but sometimes it takes a while to discover academic books. One of those titles that was displayed at the recent American Literature Association conference in Boston was Aging Masculinity in the American Novel, by Alex Hobbs, published by Rowman & Littlefield in May 2016.

In a chapter titled “Late Writing,” Hobbs focuses on John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy, while in her conclusion she asks,

“Why should sexual identity be any less valued than professional identity, for example? Roland Blythe contends, ‘Old age is not an emancipation from desire for most of us, that is a large part of its tragedy. . . . Most of all [the old] want to be wanted.’ This is certainly accurate for Roth and Updike’s protagonists, and, to a lesser degree, perhaps, Paul Auster, Ethan Canin, and Anne Tyler’s characters, too. The long-term pessimism that is displayed by Roth and Updike’s men, but not by those in Auster, Canin, and Tyler’s novels, arguably stems from the way they try to use sexual relationships as their project; they rely on women to make their life whole and worthwhile. Thus, while there should be no vilification of the need or desire to retain an active sex life in old age, the characters analyzed here indicate that it is unhealthy to make this the sole focus for this stage of life. ”

Amazon link

Hobbes earned her doctorate in English from Anglia Ruskin University and teaches through The Open University. Her critical essays have appeared in Journal of American Culture, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Philip Roth Studies.

New member’s thoughts on Toward the End of Time’s timeliness

Posted on by
Reply

Ed Phillips, a polyolefin specialist by profession and the most recent member to join The John Updike Society, says he reread John Updike’s Toward the End of Time and “realized how more timely it is today compared to when it was released in 1997.”

At least in America, Phillps writes, “1997 was a relatively calm year” that was “way pre-9/11. Nobody had heard of al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden except the CIA. NEOCONS biding their time. Arguably the biggest story of 1997 was the death of Princess Diana . . . .

“Updike was 66 at the time, writing about 66-year-old Ben Turnbull, a comfortably retired wealth management manager living with his second wife in a seaside manse outside of Boston in the year 2020,” and Phillips, now 66 himself, decided it would be a good time to reread the novel . . . .

“It’s been 20 years, but I don’t recall it as one of Updike’s more memorable books. Normally for me his writing often blurs the line between extremely fine prose and poetry. I love gliding through his 150-word descriptive sentences. But the critics were not too fond of it either. One predicted that he had run out of juice. Thank goodness that wasn’t true. Maybe he was just intellectually exhausted from writing In the Beauty of the Lilies, perhaps his best work, just the year before. But Toward the End of Time was dark. An ineffectual Congress led by an incompetent President Smith had gotten the United States into a failed nuclear war with China. What a preposterous storyline! Vast areas have been seriously ‘de-populated.’ Our infrastructure and economy are badly damaged, travel between coasts is impossible, the dollar has been replaced with local emergency currency, script that is used to pay off entrepreneurs for basic services and security.

“Updike paints Turnbull as a man far past 66. I can say this being 66. Admittedly, though there are days when I feel much older. . . .

“No one can ‘observe’ like Updike. Read Just Looking (1989) or Still Looking (2005), Updike’s essays on art. They are works of art in themselves. But in Toward the End of Time, through Turnbull he describes every leaf and every petal and pistol and stamen in his wife’s gardens as they evolve and change texture and color and decay and smell over the course of four seasons. Almost as fillers, Updike throws in some golf talk and religious history and a few Vonnegutiann sci-fi elements.

“But Turnbull (Updike?) is also obsessed with sex, the act, in uncomfortable and incredibly graphic detail, fluids and all and has or recalls a lot of it throughout the book until of course he, Trumbull, being 66, becomes impotent and incontinent (again with the fluids) as a result of prostate surgery.

“Twenty years after its release, we are living in darker and certainly more uncertain times and the storyline doesn’t seem so preposterous now, and neither does the mood. Updike couldn’t possibly have foreseen the first 100 days of the Trump administration. But Toward the End of Time is far timelier now and should be given a second read. When Kellyanne Conway spoke the term “Alternative Facts” in a CNN interview, sales of Orwell’s 1984 shot up to #3 on the best seller list, with sales increasing by 10,000 percent. I think Toward the End of Time is far more relevant.

Joseph Epstein on Sex and Euphemism

Posted on by
Reply

Open access online archives continue to spring up, and the latest Updike-related essay to become available is an essay written for the April 1, 1984 Commentary by Joseph Epstein. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s Joke or anything remotely Orwellian. “Sex and Euphemism” is a consideration of sex in western popular culture, and of course that means John Updike merits a mention.

“It is not always clear what the purposes of other novelists are in placing elaborately described bouts of sex in their novels. It might be kindest to say that they are, in manifold senses, just screwing around. But I think these writers rather desperately need sex in order to stay in business as writers. It isn’t that sex is all they know; it is merely that sex seems to be what they know best. To restrict myself to American novelists alone, I can think of three prominent figures who, but for the opportunity that the contemporary novel allows them to write about sex, would probably have to go into the dry-cleaning business: John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer,” Epstein writes.

“These three gents, to be sure, make quite different uses of sex in their novels. For John Updike sexual descriptions often provide an opportunity for a metaphor-soaked, lyrical workout; exceptions are the frequent sexual paces Updike puts his character Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom through, when it becomes lower-middle-class sex, plain-spoken and snarly and nasty. Philip Roth plays the sex in his novels chiefly for laughs, but play it he does, over and over and over. But whereas Up-dike can be by turns pretentious and repellent, and Roth depressing while trying for humor, Norman Mailer, in his handling of the sexual subject, is unconsciously comic (not, I hasten to add, that reading him is likely to cheer anyone up). Sex almost always provides the big moments in Norman Mailer’s novels; in these novels, sex, somehow, is always a challenge, a chance for triumph, an over the hill, boys, walk on the moon bullfight, though when it is over what one mostly remembers is the bull. Quotations on request.”

Epstein concludes, “Suffice it to say that in contemporary writing about sex, we are not talking, and haven’t been for some years, about your simple Sunday afternoon fornication. Not only must sex in the contemporary novel grow more regular but it must become more rococo. Thus Updike presents us with an activity known euphemistically as California sunshine; Roth in his most recent novel has a woman whose purse contains a “nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K.Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope”; Mailer, relying on fundamentals, concentrates on heterosexual sodomy. Ah, the literary life.”

Read the full article.

Asian scholar considers Updike’s Idea of America

Posted on by
Reply

The “Idea of America in Select Novels of John Updike,” a Ph.D. thesis by Tehreem Zehra (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India) published in 2014, is available to read online courtesy of Shodhganga: a reservoir of Indian theses.

“What Hawthorne did for American Puritanism was further carried out by Updike in his literary career through 20th century America,” Zehra writes. “Beginning with Rabbit series which make up the backbone of his literary outburst, he seldom eulogizes the American spirit of adultery, selfishness, capitalism, consumerism, and wavering faith. He puts his heart and soul to reform the deteriorating self and values of his nation.”

Here is the link to the full paper, downloadable in 18 front matter, chapter, and bibliography files.

Newly archived: Updike and Suburbia essay

Posted on by
Reply

The IAFOR Paper Archive recently uploaded “John Updike and the Grandeur of American Suburban Life,” a critical study by Oliver Hadingham, Rikkyo University, Japan presented at the 2016 Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science.

Abstract:
The standing of John Updike (1932-2009), a multiple prize-winning author of more than 60 books, has suffered over the last two decades. Updike’s great subject was ordinary middle class America. He strove to illuminate the truths of small town America, to reveal the beauty in its ordinariness. Updike captures the texture of ordinary American life and the way sex and religion frame modern American existence, and the path of America itself, from the cozy Eisenhower era to the uncertainties and exhaustion of the early 21st century. Updike mission was to articulate something serious and empowering to the ordinary reader – the truths and texture of America itself.

Link to full paper

Essay on Updike’s late-life essays

Posted on by
Reply

Issue 5 (Spring 2016) of the Irish Journal of American Studies features an essay by John Updike Society members Laurence W. Mazzeno and Susan Norton titled “Thirty-Six Point Perpetua: John Updike’s Personal Essays in the Later Years.”

Abstract:
This article considers the central preoccupations and modus operandi of the American writer John Updike as an essayist with personal, autobiographical intent. Best known in the American canon for his many works of fiction, he produced nonfiction in equal measure over the course of his lengthy career. His far-ranging critical reviews and topical, discursive writings have occupied pride of place in the most prominent periodicals of our times and have garnered much critical and popular attention. Yet his specifically self-referential essays, especially those composed in the final years of his life, deserve closer notice for the ways in which they reveal a survival impulse that speaks to the willing vulnerability not only of Updike, but of all who write about themselves.

Here’s the link to the full article on the journal’s website.

Law review article cites prison censorship of Updike

Posted on by
Reply

An article by David M. Shapiro published by The George Washington Law Review on “Lenient in Theory, Dumb in Fact: Prison, Speech, and Scrutiny” exposes inconsistencies and illogical practices regarding the restriction of reading matter in prisons, and mentions Updike in so doing.

Abstract
The Supreme Court declared thirty years ago in Turner v. Safley that prisoners are not without constitutional rights: any restriction on those rights must be justified by a reasonable relationship between the restriction at issue and a legitimate penological objective. In practice, however, the decision has given prisoners virtually no protection. Exercising their discretion under Turner, correctional officials have saddled prisoners’ expressive rights with a host of arbitrary restrictions—including prohibiting President Obama’s book as a national security threat; using hobby knives to excise Bible passages from letters; forbidding all non-religious publications; banning Ulysses, John Updike, Maimonides, case law, and cat pictures. At the same time, the courts have had no difficulty administering the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which gives prisons far less deference by extending strict scrutiny to free exercise claims by prisoners. Experience with the Turner standard demonstrates that it licenses capricious invasions of constitutional rights, and RLUIPA demonstrates that a heightened standard of review can protect prisoners’ expressive freedoms without compromising prison security. It is time for the Court to revisit Turner.

Shapiro noted that “A prison allowed magazines such as Playboy and Maxim but prohibited works by John Updike as salacious. . . .”

“No to John Updike, Yes to Porn”

“The following example, and those that follow, are instances in which courts struck down speech restrictions under the Turner standard. Again, not all courts that have applied Turner treat it as a rubber stamp.228 These examples, however, illustrate restrictions that prison and jail authorities thought they could impose under the legal standard, even if incorrectly. While these restrictions ultimately did not survive scrutiny, the fact that officials tried to implement them at all provides further support for the view that Turner’s ability to deter constitutional violations at the outset is limited.

In Cline v. Fox, 229 the district court considered a purge of a prison library, which resulted in the removal of 259 books, which, in the view of the prison, constituted ‘obscene material.’ 230 Prison staff were instructed to read every book in the library and ‘to eliminate any book that contained language that might arouse the reader.’ 231 Books purged from the shelves included ‘William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, and a number of works by John Updike.’ 232 The court noted that ‘[t]he prohibition also applies regardless of the context of the depiction or the content of the work as a whole. Therefore, literary classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and religious texts like the Bible technically violate this regulation.’ 233 Meanwhile, prisoners were allowed to receive commercial pornography, including such magazines as Playboy and Maxim. 234 Based on this inconsistency, the court struck down the regulation under Turner. 235 [. . .]

from The George Washington Law Review Vol. 84:4 (July 2016). 972-1028.

Terrorist and Jihadi fiction: a scholarly paper

Posted on by
Reply

Jago Morrison’s paper, “Jihadi fiction: radicalisation narratives in the contemporary novel” is available online, published 6 March 2017 by the Taylor & Francis Group. Here’s the abstract (link to full text also available):

“As Ulrich Beck suggests in World at Risk, fear of Islamist extremism has become a dominant strand in contemporary perceptions of risk. In the media, a set of ‘stock’ radicalisation narratives have emerged in which, typically, a misguided loner is brainwashed into embracing a violent perversion of Islam. In the background, the wider Muslim community is accused of a dangerous complicity and complacency. This essay explores some notable attempts in fiction to unpick such popular radicalisation narratives. In novels by John Updike and Sunjeev Sahota, the psychological and faith dimensions of suicide bombing are a key focus, attempting to explore from the inside, how an educated young Muslim might be impelled along the path to martyrdom. In texts by Mohsin Hamid and J.M. Coetzee, the ideological staging of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘fundamentalism’ themselves is brought into question. Current counterterrorist measures include indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, while in the UK, over two million public sector workers have been recruited to the largest surveillance exercise ever codified in British law. In this context, the essay shows how recent fiction has attempted to trouble the frames of representation through which a perpetual state-of-emergency is passed off as our ‘new normal.'”

“In John Updike’s Terrorist,” Morrison writes, “both radicalisation and its contexts are portrayed rather differently. Again, the focus of the novel is to explore the risk of a devastating suicide attack, but to do so through an individual, human story. This, however, is very much an American tale, in which the impulse towards extremism is seen as rising, at least in part, out of the bleakness and inanity of contemporary suburban life. Like Sahota, Updike begins by drawing a protagonist who is damaged and ripe for influence. No visit to Afghanistan is required for Ahmad: between the machinations of a local imam and those of a CIA agent, the manipulations all happen close to home, in an ordinary city modelled on Paterson, New Jersey. In Updike’s portrayal, Ahmad is an impressionable and (somewhat cartoonishly) zealous American teenager, product of a broken home and in search of self-esteem. Raised non-religious after his Egyptian father abandoned him as a young child, he is described by his mother as ‘trusting’ and ‘easily led.’”

Continue reading →

Prospect’s Edward Pearce on John Updike

Posted on by
Reply

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

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike reviewed

Posted on by
Reply

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.