Updike scholars and fans can now access a critical essay on Couples that was published in The International Fiction Review 23 (1996):

“Fire, Rain, Rooster:  John Updike’s Christian Allegory in Couples,” by Sukhbir Singh, University of Chicago, begins,

“Most critics deal with John Updike’s Couples (1969) as a book about ‘sex,’ and ‘adultery.’ They invariably argue that in Couples, Updike advocates promiscuity as an antidote to the prevalent climate of nihilism, and he thereby repudiates a cardinal dictum of Christianity: ‘Though Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’ These commentators pay scant attention to Updike’s view of the supernatural and miss his allegorical motif in the novel. Contrary to their assertions, I will argue that Couples is a novel of spiritual awakening, taking into account the symbolic significance of the burning church in the text, and that in his novels Updike upholds the Christian belief in the presence of God and the piety of love, sex, and marriage.”

A 1972 thesis “Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Physical Education” is now available online.

Click here to access Kathryn Jane Upshaw’s “John Updike and Norman Mailer: Sport Inferences,” which was filed in September 1972. To navigate past the title page, click on the right center edge to move forward, and the left center edge to go backward. “Through the analysis of the lives and writings of modern contemporary American authors John Updike and Norman Mailer, the allusions to sport were studied with a view toward understanding the inferences of that phenomenon on the development of the novel’s elements of plot, character, and setting. Furthermore, sport inferences were studied in light of style.”

The author studied Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, Couples, and Rabbit Redux, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam? 

Peter C. Herman, Professor of English Literature at San Diego State University, recently published “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist” in Modern Philology 112: 4 (May 2015), 691-712.

Full article.MP

They say there’s a blog about everything, and yesterday at The Home of Schlemiel Theory a writer going by the user name mfeuer2012 published a piece “On Cynthia Ozick’s Denunciation of Henry Bech: John Updike’s Literary Portrayal of the Jew as Schlemiel,” the title of which may go a long ways toward explaining.

Ozick called Bech “theologically hollow” and according to the author “her reasons for choosing such a term and making such a trenchant criticism of Updike’s attempt to represent a Jew are noteworthy. They give us a sense of how Ozick—and others—might criticize many of the schlemiels we see in literature and film today. It also gives us a glimpse of her criterion for what makes for a plausible Jewish character in Jewish American fiction.”

Citing other novels as well, the author writes, “Ozick’s gloss on these ‘de-Judaicized Jewish novelists’ foreshadows her rant on what is missing not just in Bech but in most Jewish writing today: knowledge of Jewish history. But this omission is not done out of neglect so much as what Ozick calls ‘autolobotomy.’ Wondering at this caricature of the Jew, Ozick suggests we think about how this would sound if this kind of portrayal were done with respect to real African-Americans.”

Later: “Updike, argues Ozick, loves Bech most when he is ‘thoroughly de-Beched’—when ‘Bech is most openly, most shrewdly, most strategically, most lyrically Updike’ (119). And this happens when the ‘Appropriate Reference Machine’ (ARM from here on) breaks down. At these moments of failure, Updike the theologian takes over.

“And in these moments, when the ARM breaks, there is a brief exposure to a Christeological kind of epiphany. However, this doesn’t transform Beck. Rather he returns to a kind of state that is . . . comical.”

Read the entire article.

Recently The Witherspoon Institute Public Discourse website featured a post by Gerald R. McDermott in the “Literature, Religion and the Public Square” subsection on “‘A Rather Antinomian Christianity’: John Updike’s Religion.” 

“How could a man be so religious and yet be so enthusiastic for infidelity?” McDermott asks.

“The answer seems to lie in his religion. It was a strange sort of Christianity that rejected the structures of traditional faith, choosing divine comfort while rejecting divine commands. In other words, it was gospel without law, grace without repentance, the love of God without the holiness of God.

“To be sure, Updike held on to parts of historic Christian belief. He rejected materialism as a failure to make sense of emotion and conscience, and defended Christ’s divinity against his first wife’s Unitarianism. At the same time, he took from Kierkegaard the idea that Christian faith is subjective, not a conclusion from rationality or objectivity. So he insisted that resurrection from the dead is ‘unthinkable’ to the modern mind, that God can be known only as ‘the self projected onto reality’ by our natural optimism, and that the closer one moves toward Christianity the more it disappears, ‘as a fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.’

“Updike’s Christianity was a religion of self-affirmation. His greatest fears were of death and its threat of nothingness. But religion, he wrote, ‘enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.'”