Category Archives: Updike in Context

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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Updike cited as a Guardian of Language

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If your pet peeves include people who speak the language with little regard for or knowledge of correctness, you might be interested in a Jan. 10 Quillette article by Bruce Gilley on “Guarding the Gates of Our Language; One hundred years after the publication of Fowler’s ‘Dictionary of Modern English Usage,’ it is more important than ever to uphold standards of correct English.”

Of course, “America’s Man of Letters,” as William Pritchard dubbed him, was cited. John Updike, the master stylist and a precise practitioner of the language, was apparently involved in a kerfuffle involving his beloved New Yorker:

“Most surprising, perhaps, is the enduring allegiance to Fowler at The New Yorker, citadel of oppressed writers, and writers on oppression, in modern American letters. In a curtain-raiser in September 2025 for the Fowler centenary, the University of Delaware academic Ben Yagoda traced the inextricable links between the magazine, launched in 1925, and Fowler, almost as if the magazine was founded as a sort of Society for the Propagation of the Fowler in the United States. In one telling anecdote culled from the magazine’s archives, Yagoda found that the young John Updike, while studying at Oxford in 1954, had submitted a poem to the magazine that was caught up in a minor storm of editorial debate on punctuation according to Fowler. Updike bowed before the strictures, and his corrected poem was published later that year. Thereafter, he seems to have become Keeper of the Fowler at The New Yorker. His scathing review of Burchfield’s 1996 desecration is a monument to fine English sensibilities in the New World. ‘It has the charm, in this age of cultural diversity and politically correct sensitivity, of assuring all users of English that no intelligible usage is absolutely wrong,’ Updike writes. ‘But it proposes no ideal of clarity in language or, beyond that, of grace, which might serve as an instrument of discrimination.’ That word again.

“As Updike foresaw, the globalisation of English and the radicalisation of the academy mean that the need for Fowler has become greater not less. ‘The language is a mess, except as scoured and rinsed and hung out to dry by Fowler.’”

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Blogger shares favorite Updike story

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OnJan. 3, 2026, Patrick Kurp posted comments on his favorite Updike story on Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life: “The Happiest I’ve Been.”

“Of all Updike’s stories, this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It’s the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. For most of us, happiness is a momentary state, not perpetual.”

Kurp added, “Of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Nabokov writes:

“‘The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

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New essay tackles the question of Updike and misogyny

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Teaching American Literature:  A Journal of Theory and Practice has published Sue Norton’s article “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus” in its Winter 2025 edition.  It is the product of Norton’s 2024 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship.  The article builds upon several decades of literary criticism in Updike studies and incorporates the work of JUS members Marshall Boswell and Biljana Dojčinović.

 

 

RSVP now for a zoom course on Updike and Roth

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The Library of America will offer a four-part zoom course on literary friends and rivals John Updike and Philip Roth, taught by Adam Gopnik, who delivered the opening keynote talk at the October 2025 joint Philip Roth and John Updike societies conference in New York City.

The sessions will be held weekly on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30-2:45, Jan. 14 through Feb. 4. The class will be recorded and shared with registrants so they can watch it any time.

“Inspired by the multivolume LOA editions of Roth and Updike, this course will delve into their complex relationship and many masterpieces, from early short-fiction triumphs, to the scandalous 1960s breakthroughs Portnoy’s Complaint and Couples, to brilliant late-career works like Roth’s American Trilogy and Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies that show these two literary lions confronting their legacies and making bold bids for artistic immortality.”

The course costs $200 and includes a coupon for 40 percent off all Roth and Updike volumes in the LOA series. Participation is limited, so RSVP now if interested.

Click here to RSVP (required) and learn more. 

Volume of Updike’s selected letters draws praise

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James Schiff’s long-awaited Selected Letters of John Updike will be released on Oct. 21, 2025, with a reading-booksigning-publication party scheduled that evening at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, where Schiff is in town to convene with other members of The John Updike Society for a joint Roth-Updike Conference with the Philip Roth Society.

The volume of Updike’s selected letters, decades in the making and years in the gathering, runs a whopping 912 pages and is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Updike’s publisher.

Early reviews were positive . . . and insightful, while later reviews continue to positive to glowing.

Kirkus Reviews
“Missives from the mountain. Updike . . . wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. ‘I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’ he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. . . . In 1960, he wrote to publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought to present an image of an averagely physical young American.’ He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be ‘to funk my job.’ At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: ‘I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.”
Read the entire review 

WSJ – The Wall Street Journal, reviewed by Thomas Mallon
“In ‘Selected Letters of John Updike,’ a new and predictably enormous collection of Updike’s correspondence, we see all his lovers, spouses, neighbors and children as persons, and we experience Updike himself with even more candor than he displayed in his first-person essays. . . . The letters illuminate the consistency of Updike’s fiction aesthetic. Remarkably, at 19, he wrote of the need for ‘an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.’ He would maintain, decade after decade, that style ‘is nothing less than the writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing.”
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The New York Times, reviewed by Dwight Garner
“Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. . . . Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.”
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Clouds Hill Books offers Updike bibliographer’s collection for sale

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Updike collectors take note:  The extensive collection of Michael Broomfield (of Broomfield & De Bellis bibliography fame) is for sale, item-by-item, from Clouds Hill Books in Montclair, N.J.

Whether you’re looking to add an item to your collection, buy something to donate to The John Updike Childhood Home, or just curious, the two attached lists also constitute a useful companion to the bibliography, as they give some indication of rarity . . . if selling price is a good barometer.

John Updike – From the Library of Michael Broomfield – List #1

John Updike – From the Library of Michael Broomfield – List #2

 

 

Writer Anne Bernays recalls Updike in an interview

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On July 14, 2025, Virginia Pye posted an interview she did with writer Anne Bernays for Cambridge Day: “We had fun.” Bernays is a longtime resident of the Boston area and the author of 10 novels, two books of nonfiction with her husband Justin Kaplan, and a book on the craft of writing with fellow Cambridge author Pamela Painter.

When Pye asked Bernays, “But you say Cambridge as a literary center hasn’t really fed you or your work over the years?” Bernays responded,

“I’m very gregarious, as you can tell, and I enjoy meeting people. I love talking to people and when there was no community, I and two other people, we decided to form one here. And soon after that one of them moved away and the other person lost interest, so I was left with founding Pen New England, which I ran for 10 years. I was the head of the board and I had some of my friends on it. Nobody wanted to do it. That’s often how it is, but people came to the panels we put on.

“My favorite one was called, ‘Rejection.’ John Updike, who was a friend, I got him to come on. And all these people were there, including Leslie Epstein, talking about rejection. When John Updike talked about rejection there was this gasp from the audience. It was the best thing that could have happened because people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘John Updike was rejected?’ It made the process less awesome, less scary. We had fun.”

Read the whole interview.

Updike is referenced in a book of Mark Twain poems

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John Updike Society president James Plath spent two weeks as a fall 2023 Quarry Farm Fellow working on an essay detailing how Twain modeled being a celebrity writer for both Hemingway and Updike. Plath conducted that research, but also felt compelled to write poems about the house and its inhabitants. Not surprisingly, Updike found his way into one of the poems:

Carved Stone Troughs

John Updike saw himself in a dogwood tree
his parents planted the year he turned one.
Parents do such things. Twain’s jeu d’esprit
led him to place four troughs in part-sun

along the Farm on East Hill road, so spaced
to revive tired horses, and with their carvings mark
the birth of four Clemens—who may have raced
later to see whose was used, while dogs would bark.

But when three of four children die before the father,
those troughs become hollowed-out markers that bear
the burden of emptiness, not crosses to inspire prayer
or reflection. It’s a wonder that Twain continued to care,

funneling stone-cold grief into sage
satire, instead of yielding to alcohol and rage.

At Quarry Farm was published in June 2025 by Kelsay Books and is available from the publisher and Amazon. Society members wanting a copy and who also plan on attending the Roth-Updike Conference in NYC in October can email Plath (jplath@iwu.edu) to bring a copy there to save postage.