Category Archives: Updike in Context

Updike podcast is up and running again

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Bob Batchelor’s podcast John Updike: American Writer, American Life is active again. The new episode is titled “Why You Should Be Reading John Updike: The; Writer Who Predicted Everything.”

From the site: “Hosted by cultural historian and Updike biographer Bob Batchelor, each episode is focused, sharp, and built for listeners who want to dive into the life and career of one of America’s greatest writers.

“Updike saw the death of American manufacturing. He wrote about economic anxiety before it became a political movement. He diagnosed the collapse of masculine identity before the culture had a vocabulary for it. He saw the 1970s energy crisis, not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a permanent reckoning with American assumptions about prosperity and progress. And he did it all in beautiful, lyrial sentences.

“He also wrote things that make contemporary readers uncomfortable. His male characters objectify and flee. His perspective is overwhelmingly white and suburban. This podcast doesn’t hide from those tensions. It engages them, because honest conversations about American literature require addressing human complexity, not running from it.

“Each episode takes one aspect of Updike’s life, work, or world and opens it up: the Pennsylvania mill town that shaped him, the New Yorker years that refined his voice, the feminist critique that shadowed his reputation, the beautiful and brutal sentences that remain his most enduring legacy. From the Rabbit novels to Couples to Terrorist—from Updike’s poetry to his art criticism—no corner of the work is off limits.”

Podcast explores Updike’s novel ‘The Coup’

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On “Ninety-Nine Novels: The Coup by John Updike,” Graham Foster explained, “In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

“In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to writer and critic Bob Batchelor about The Coup by John Updike, a novel Anthony Burgess called ‘a beautifully written disturbing lyric composition’. . . .

“Bob Batchelor has written 16 books on subjects as wide as The Great Gatsby, Jim Morrison and the Doors, the Prohibition, and comic book writer Stan Lee. He has written extensively about John Updike, including the book John Updike: A Critical Biography. He has also presented the podcast series John Updike: American Writer, American Life. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture at Coastal Carolina University.”

Booker winner David Szalay credits Amis and Updike

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In “David Szalay: ‘If you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid; The Booker prize-winning author of Flesh on class, punctuation, and what he learned from Amis and Updike,” Observer book critic Anthony Cummins wrote,

“Asked about the influences on Flesh during the post-prize press conference on Monday night, Szalay – fielding questions from reporters from Italy, Canada and China – said that there were lots but wasn’t able to name any. In fact he’s already namechecked several, including Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel Jacob’s Room, but it’s long been a source of speculation whether he had Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon in mind when writing Flesh. Szalay says he has seen it – when he was about 20 – ‘and the rags-to-riches arc was an influenc’. The novel Ultraluminous, by the American writer Katherine Faw, is another . . . .”

But, as Cummins added, “Szalay attributes his attraction to unsavoury subject matter to reading Martin Amis and John Updike in his teens. ‘Maybe I took from them the lesson that if you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid. But I think it’s also that I’m always on my guard against dealing only with supposedly elevated subjects’.”

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Ink Spill spotlights more Updike on Thurber

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On one of their “Thurber Thursdays,” Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events was inspired by the recent publication of the Selected Letters of John Updike to do a little sleuthing and post the results.

A footnote on page 333 of Letters mentions Updike’s piece “On Meeting Writers” as being retitled “Writers I Have Met” and published in The New York Times Book Review on August 11, 1968. It “included drawings of Updike and the various writers he discusses: Joyce Cary, James Thurber, and E.B. White.”

“Thinking that Updike had drawn a self portrait along with sketches of Cary, Thurber, and White (drawings I did not recall ever seeing!) I scurried over to the Updike books here and pulled Picked-up Pieces off the shelf. ‘On Meeting Writers’ is the very first picked up piece in the book — it appears on page 3. But alas…no drawings.

“I then went to The New York Times archive and found the piece as it appeared in the paper (what an incredibly wonderful resource that is). I can’t reproduce the page here, but I can tell you I was thrilled, initially, to see drawings (I thought by Updike) accompanying it.

“They didn’t really look at all like Updike drawings, but I’ve become used to seeing how he had explored a variety of styles throughout his life — I supposed this was another exploration. But when I zoomed in on the credit for the drawings, I found the drawings were not by Updike, but by (and I mean no disrespect here by expressing disappointment) Jim Spanfeller . . . . So no Updike Thurber and E.B. White drawing, but –bonus — I learned about Mr. Spanfeller.

BBC’s ‘Front Row’ interviews James Schiff about the Updike letters

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The Nov. 11 episode of BBC’s Front Row spotlighted art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer and radical Christianity, James Schiff on Selected Letters of John Updike, and director Edgar Wright on the new dystopian film The Running Man.

The Updike material begins around the 13:30 mark when the interviewer talks with writer Gish Jen, one of many who received letters from Updike.

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Updike’s early unpublished novel may soon lose the ‘un’

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Trevor Meek, of The Local News (Ipswich, Mass.), published a Jan. 31, 2026 piece on the Selected Letters of John Updike that began,

“Living in Ipswich in the 1960s and ’70s with John Updike as a neighbor meant playing a high-stakes game of literary roulette. “On any given day, you might crack open his newest novel or short story to discover you’d been immortalized — or perhaps skewered — on a page destined to be read by millions around the world. “That uneasy thrill returned for some folks late last year with the release of Selected Letters of John Updike.

“’Even with this book, various people are looking through it to see if they’re mentioned,’ said Updike’s son, Michael, a sculptor. “’And then when they realize they are mentioned, they’re insulted,’ he added with a laugh.”

Michael Updike, heavily quoted in the article, defended his father against one of the most common charges. “He seems to be an author who is judged as a misogynist because some of his characters are selfish. . . . We don’t say Nabokov is a pedophile because his character Humbert Humbert is one in Lolita.”

Michael Updike told The Local News that he’s working on the release of his father’s unpublished novel, Home. “We’re still figuring out how to get that rolling,” he said.

We asked Michael (pictured) for more details, and here’s what he had to say:

“Chris Carduff [who edited several of Updike’s Library of America volumes] gave us the idea, saying it was a completed novel albeit rejected by a publishing house. Jim Schiff [editor of the Selected Letters] has read it and says it’s not a perfect novel but does have a lot of new material about my grandmother in it. Andrew Wylie has been sent a copy and he thinks it should be published. So much of it is hand written, and our first step is to find a good typist who will type it up in Word. Then an editor to comb out any redundant or rough spots, and Wiley will shop it around. No timeline, but hopefully soon, by publishing terms—two or three years.”

Updike didn’t talk much about Home with interviewers, but he did tell Eric Rhode in 1969, ” I had written, prior to [The Poorhouse Fair], while living in New York City, a 600-page novel, called, I think, Home, and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of 16 or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel.”

If Home is as heavily autobiographical as Updike suggests, perhaps it will be read and appreciated as a companion to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989).

Raritan, now deceased, wasn’t a fan of John Updike

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In Sheena Meng’s “A requiem for Raritan,” published on The Point, one thing rings pointedly clear:  “The editors were not particularly fond of Updike. Richard Poirier and Thomas R. Edwards, both literary critics and professors of literature at Rutgers, leveled coolly disdainful gazes at him in their 1978 proposal for the magazine:

The publication of a new book by John Updike, let us say, is probably not an event of the same magnitude as the publication of a new book by Bellow or Pynchon, by Elizabeth Bishop or Doris Lessing … He seems at the moment to be a writer of comparatively, and predictably, lesser weight, and for whatever reasons he does not call into play the cultural forces and special interests that are at work on behalf (or against) these other writers.

“It was their mutual confusion regarding Updike’s popularity that also solidified matters between Poirier and his successor, Rutgers historian Jackson Lears. One of the questions he had hoped to address when he founded the magazine, Poirier told Lears, was: How does a writer like John Updike get lionized and celebrated as if he’s some genius man of letters? Raritan, in other words, was interested in “cultural power,” as Poirier declared in his prefatory editor’s note: “those intricate movements by which ideas or events, canons or hierarchies of preference, minorities or cultural strata come into existence.” Updike, not considered ‘a sufficiently rewarding clue to something more important than the texts he writes,’ was given no notice in its pages.”

Sounds like Raritan‘s editors may have socialized with famous Updike detractors John Aldridge or David Foster Wallace, since all of the writers they cite as being superior have occasioned relatively the same level of interest from readers, and graduate students working on their theses or dissertations, as Updike.

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Selected Letters editor offers insights on Updike and Pennsylvania

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James Schiff, vice president of The John Updike Society and editor of The John Updike Review, gave a great interview to Charles McElwee on The Real Clear Pennsylvania Podcast.  Schiff, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, talked about the Selected Letters of John Updike, which Schiff also edited and the debut of which the Updike Society celebrated in New York City in October 2025.

Here’s the link

Book reviewer references Updike and Roth

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Andrew Gelman, in reviewing The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers for The Future of Statistical Modeling (Substack), relies on John Updike and Philip Roth for a core comparison:

“Going back a bit in literary time, The Ten Year Affair is a lot like the novels of John Updike: various suburban married couples having affairs. The writing style is different–Updike is famously lyrical, whereas Somers uses a Millennial flat writing style: This happens, then This happens, then That happens, etc. Kind of like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver if they had a sense of humor.

“I think Somers does a much better job than Updike in conveying what it feels like to be a parent. To me, Updike, like Philip Roth, was to the end of his life always a son, never a father. Updike did have four kids, but I guess his wife did most of the parenting. Updike’s characters often have children but always seem to be thinking only about themselves. Not so much that his adult characters are self-centered–I mean, yeah, they are, but that’s kind of the point–but more that their children don’t seem to exist at all, except to the extent that they sometimes have to be dealt with as obstacles when they get in the way of the parents. In contrast, the adults in The Ten Year Affair are very aware of their kids. In some ways this is similar to Little Children by Tom Perotta, a book whose entire theme is that these adults are thinking only of themselves and are not shouldering the responsibilities of parenthood.”

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Is reading Updike, even ‘Golf Dreams,’ an ‘act of rebellion’?

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From The Falling Knife by Harvey Sawikin (Substack):

“The critic Ted Gioia recently posted a Substack called Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased? He noted that among those being forgotten are literary giants like John Cheever and Saul Bellow; musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker; and movies like Citizen Kane. John Updike not long ago was one of America’s most prominent living writers, yet reading him today would be, in Gioia’s words, ‘an act of rebellion.’

“Call me a wild-eyed revolutionary, because I’ve just finished a book of Updike’s essays, Golf Dreams. I’ve been reading his novels since I was a teenager, starting with The Centaur, moving on to Rabbit, Run (which I was too young to understand), and over the decades getting to most of the others (Rabbit Is Rich is my favorite). Updike could write anything — novels, stories, poetry, essays — and bring to it his gift for the exquisite image and the revealing metaphor, as well as his insight into human psychology.”

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