Blogger-essayist Chris Schumerth recently posted an essay he wrote on “John Updike’s Rabbit, Male Alienation, and the Fear of Intimacy.”
Although Schumerth admits he’s only read Rabbit, Run, he incorporates the opinions of scholars and understands that “To read Rabbit, Run as solely a condemnation of Rabbit’s sexual infidelities cheapens does [sic] a disservice to Rabbit’s psyche and the moral dilemma involved.”
Daniel Ross Goodman wrote an essay for The Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse titled “Updike’s Wager: Brilliance, Doubt, and the Miracle of Existence” that gets right to the heart of the matter: what made Updike’s life and literature “approachable.”
“Very few literary lives are comparable to that of John Updike,” Goodman writes, but asserts that “Updike, despite occasional flourishes in his Rabbit novels, lacks the fierce passion that animated the life and literature of his contemporary (and erstwhile rival) Philip Roth. Yet both Updike’s career and Begley’s extremely well-written book are, unfortunately, largely boring. They are boring in their brilliance, boring in their monotonous excellence, and boring in their clinical perfection of form. To read Updike—and to read about his life—is to observe an incessant stream of perfection and good fortune: perfectly placed word; perfect job placement; fluid story; unimpeachable novel; immaculately executed prose; novelist taking his place among the finest of the realist tradition. We yearn for Updike to be challenged, just as we exult in Rabbit Angstrom’s rare displays of tempestuous rage.
“Why the lack of intense passion in Updike? Why does Harold Bloom’s stinging critique of Updike—”a minor novelist with a major style”—still retain its pique? Perhaps it was because Updike did not experience the deep suffering of many other literary geniuses.”
Goodman nonetheless concludes that Updike, compared to a host of literary luminaries, “may be the most intellectually curious writer of them all (George Eliot excepted, of course),” and it is “his extreme existential angst that makes Updike’s life and literature approachable. For who among us does not wonder about the meaning of our lives, the value of religion, and the nature of the universe? This element of existential exploration imparts a compelling, fascinating dimension to his work.”
Read the whole essay here.
On Line opinion, Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, recently posted a critical article by Peter Sellick on John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies.
“All the characters love the movies. Indeed Updike gives us a potted history of American movie making. It is obvious that the movies become, to a large extent, a window on reality and that in doing so they displace the key role of the Church of mediating reality. The narratives of Scripture are replaced by those of Bogart and Bacall,” Sellick writes.
“In Lilies Updike gives us a narrative of social, familial and spiritual decline that is associated with the loss of faith. In this he is no romantic, harking back to a lost and idealized Christendom. There has never been a time in which faith has not been fragile and rare. But he charts our time and finds ground to conclude that we are experiencing our very own crisis and that this is demonstrable by the isolation and foundering of the self of which Clark is the end product.”
“Updike gives us a narrative arc in Lilies that follows a family who had experienced a profound loss of faith, a professional churchman, considered, educated, comes to the conclusion that God does not exist. The effect of this event is worked out in the next three generations in detail. It is a convincing narrative. Like the gospels, it is a story that includes verifiable historical events and movements upon which a fictional overlay is placed. For me, the story resonates; I understand the connections that Updike makes. Such a narrative is able to cut through to the truth in a way that sociology finds difficult.”
Earlier today, Victoria Zhuang, a Harvard Crimson staffer, posted a tribute to John Updike in the guise of a reading recommendation: “Staff Rec: ‘Higher Gossip’; Tribute to a Prose Poet.”
After sharing the emotion she felt upon hearing of Updike’s death, she calls the posthumously published Higher Gossip “a kind of chattering astride the grave” and notes, “The incredible thing about Updike, a quality rarely native to any other contemporary writer, is that his unmistakable prodding touch is discernible in each miscellaneous fragment, however stray. . . .
“Updike was fascinated with everything in the world, a veritable humanist astronaut. He is also a humorous observer, though a supremely self-conscious one whose strains of narcissism and misogyny, present here as elsewhere in his work, are probably only rescued by his being John Updike.”
Recently Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, edited by Dr. Vishwanath Bite, published an essay on Updike that’s also online:
“A View of 1990s American Society through Updike’s Rabbit Remembered,” by Dr. Kavitha Mohan (Angel College of Engineering and Technology, Tirupur, Tamilnadu, India) and B.S. Gomathi (Erode Sengunthar Engineering College, Thudupathi, Perundurai, Erode, Tamilnadu, India).
ABSTRACT: John Hoyer Updike is considered as one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was a great poet, short story writer, essayist, novelist, art critic and a literary critic. To brief, he was a man of letters. Updike also was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, unique prose style, and prolific output.
Updike’s Rabbit series which comprises of the novels Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest and the novella Rabbit Remembered is regarded as his supreme achievement by the critics. Rabbit Remembered draws a final close to the Rabbit saga. The novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won Pulitzer prize for fiction. Updike is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction more than once. The protagonist of the series is an American small town, protestant, middle-class man, Harry Angstrom who is nicknamed as Rabbit. As Updike mirrored America in all his works, he was also considered as a great social critic. This paper aims at viewing nineteen nineties American society through the novella Rabbit Remembered.
Here’s the full essay.
Franco Library at Alvernia University, which houses The John Updike Society Archive (renamed, apparently, John Updike Collection), has catalogued the holdings digitally and made them available online so scholars and researchers can see the full range of items in the collection and decide whether there are materials that might be of use/interest.
In fact, archivist Gene Mitchell says that if any Society members email him to set up an appointment while they’re in Reading to attend The Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference, he will make arrangements to have those materials ready and waiting.
Here’s the link to the John Updike Collection.
It’s funny how one appraisal leads to another, or a conversation . . . or a debate.
William Deresiewicz’s essay-review of Updike for The New Republic has already inspired a favorable response from National Review, that other side of the aisle publication. That’s encouraging, because these days Updike appears to be one of the few subjects that a liberal or conservative can agree upon.
Now Peter J. Leithart (First Things) weighs in with “Painter of Surfaces,” posted online on September 10, 2014, which oddly enough has nothing much to do with Updike’s painterly style.
“No one has to defend Updike’s skill as a writer,” Leithart writes, “and he was surely a success, as Deresiewicz’s rapid-fire summary indicates. . . . Updike’s reputation suffers more because he was, in Deresiewicz’s words, ‘an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. . . . Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience.’ That cannot be forgiven.
“Nor can Updike’s theological conviction. . . . But he, like the non-judgmental God of his novels, stays on the surface. Updike will be remembered as a chronicler of his times, but Deresiewicz doesn’t convince me that his novels have the depth to be of enduring importance.”
“It’s not cool to like the writing of John Updike,” National Review‘s Michael Potemra declares in “Looking at Updike, Again.” “But it’s the right thing to do.”
Wasn’t that what actor Wilford Brimley told us about eating oatmeal?
Potemra explains that the “anti-feminist rap against Updike deserves, in our current cultural plight, a little more attention. The locus classicus of this opinion was the famous phrase of David Foster Wallace, who quoted a female friend’s gibe that Updike was ‘a penis with a thesaurus.’ Now, David Foster Wallace has basically been canonized as a secular saint, and to be dismissed by him in this fashion amounts to having the phrase NOT. COOL. branded on your forehead.”
Potemra was apparently inspired to reconsider Updike after reading a New Republic book review of Adam Begley’s Updike by William Deresiewicz, whom he quotes:
“Updike—and Mailer, and Roth, and the other men (and women) of their generation—were situated at a complicated juncture in the history of sexuality. They came of age before the revolution, but not so long before that they couldn’t try to join it. Sexual freedom descended on them not as a birthright, but as a miracle. Of course they went a little wild. When the Pill came out in 1960, the oldest member of the baby boom was fourteen. Updike was 28. If he spent a lot of time thinking about sex, it’s not a big surprise. Updike, like his contemporaries, was also too early for feminism. That may not be conducive to the most progressive attitudes . . . but it also means that Updike stood between the old and new Victorianisms.”
Potemra adds, “Deresiewicz is pointing to something important: Updike, as a man of his generation, did not view ideologizing about men and women to be his basic calling in life. It was sufficient for him to watch men and women, to notice, and to record his observations in some of the best prose ever produced by an American writer.”
Film critic A.O. Scott dips one toe in familiar waters and the other in American literature to discuss what he perceives as “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” which was published on September 11, 2014.
Both Philip Roth and John Updike are mentioned—Roth, more so than Updike.
“While [Leslie] Fiedler was sitting at his desk in Missoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome [on Love and Death in the American Novel], a youthful rebellion was asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom—a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole ‘sivilized’ world.
“From there it is but a quick ride on the Pineapple Express to Apatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes of the 1960s and 1970s chafed against the demands of marriage, career and bureaucratic conformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, of adultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return a generation later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from Catch-22 to The Hangover, from Goodbye, Columbus to The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.
John Updike Society member Kangqin Li’s doctoral thesis “Vision and form in John Updike’s short fiction” was filed on September 1, 2014 and is now available online through the University of Leicester Research Archive.
Abstract:
This thesis studies the visual aesthetics of the twentieth-century American writer John Updike’s short fiction. Exploring the related issues of form and vision, temporality and visuality, the thesis seeks to combine two analyses: a study of visuality in the short fiction of Updike, and a re-consideration of the short story as a genre. I shall argue that the two levels of analysis are interrelated, for it is at the point of the epistemological uncertainty in the act of ‘seeing’ that Updike offers something unusual to the short story form; it is also around this stubborn issue of the relationship between vision and knowledge that contemporary short story criticism seems to fall short. The thesis unfolds first with a negotiation for an understanding of the short story’s special narrative space and then with a formalist analysis of Updike’s short fiction and its respective involvement with three visual media: painting, photography and cinema. Exploring the complex interrelationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ through the lens of Updike’s visually rich texts, the thesis aims to come to a better knowledge of vision and form in the short story.