Category Archives: Updike in Context

Original Magazines places Updike at the forefront of generational change

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In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”

The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across America “The Suburban Calm Before the Storm” and “The Story That Keeps Asking Questions.”

“The New Yorker had evolved far beyond its origins as a humor magazine. By the late 1950s, it had become the most prestigious launchpad in American letters—a place where fiction wasn’t decoration but dissection. J.D. Salinger had already used its pages to expose the phoniness beneath polite society. Philip Roth was sharpening his knives. And Updike, still a rising voice, had chosen the most intimate battlefield imaginable: the space between a parent’s authority and a child’s emerging autonomy.

“The magazine knew what it was doing. Sophistication and subversion, wrapped in the same elegant package.”

The article continued, “In Updike’s story, Jack—the father—spins nightly tales for his daughter Jo. The ritual should be simple: father narrates, child listens, sleep follows. But Jo has developed opinions. When Jack’s story about Roger Skunk ends with the creature’s mother insisting he keep his foul smell rather than the roses the wizard gave him, Jo rebels. She wants the wizard to hit the mother. She wants the ending rewritten.

“Jack refuses.

“What follows isn’t violence or melodrama—it’s something more unsettling. A quiet standoff between generations, between the way things have always been done and the way a child thinks they should be. The bedtime story becomes a referendum on authority itself.

“Updike wasn’t writing about skunks and wizards. He was writing about 1959 America, where the next generation was beginning to ask a question their parents found uncomfortable: Why must it be this way?”

The article concluded, “The June 13, 1959 New Yorker didn’t just publish a story about parental authority—it marked the beginning of that authority’s long, slow erosion. Updike’s ‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ remains uncomfortable precisely because it refuses resolution. Jo’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.

“Should the wizard have hit the mommy? Should children obey without understanding? Should tradition survive simply because it’s tradition?

“In 1959, these were bedtime story questions. By 1969, they were revolution.”

Read the whole article.

 

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

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Thomas Bevilacqua, a Ph.D. who teaches high school English at The Maclay School in Florida, recently posted his reaction to John Updike’s Roger’s Version on his Substack blog:

“It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment . . . while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment,” Bevilacqua wrote.

The problem, for Bevilacqua, was Updike’s “engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central. . . . The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered by how it feels . . . dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.”

Bevilacqua concluded, “Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.”

If that compulsion holds, perhaps Bevilacqua might try the other two novels in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which Updike updated and retold Hawthorne’s story of an adulterous triangle from perspective of each of the main characters, starting with the Dimmesdale character (A Month of Sundays, 1975) and ending with the Hester character (S., 1988), with the voyeuristic Roger’s Version falling in the middle (1986).

Brattleboro Literary Festival spends an hour with Michael Updike and James Schiff

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Since the Selected Letters of John Updike was published in October 2025, there have been dozens of interviews with the volume’s editor, James Schiff, and with Michael Updike, the family’s representative on the John Updike Literary Trust, who also has been doing readings and talks to promote the book.

If you only have time to listen to one of the interviews, this hour-long free-flowing conversation might be the one. For this interview, Michael is assisted by his wife, Olga Karasik-Updike, a Philip Roth and John Updike scholar. Even John Updike Society members who have known Schiff and Updike for decades will hear things for the first time. It’s an engaging, insightful  show billed as “A Literary Cocktail Hour,” recorded on May 13, 2026 and hosted by Jenny Altshuler. Here’s the link.

Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ makes list of books ‘That Capture This American Moment’

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Time magazine asked “25 literary luminaries to pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation’s history and beyond its borders . . . . a reading list to match this moment.”

Ron Chernow, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life and recently published a biography of Mark Twain, picked the second volume in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux:

“Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike’s extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Writer Ian McEwan and actor Cillian Murphy have called Updike’s collective Rabbit novels their choice for Great American Novel.

“25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” posted May 12, 2026

Tweeter says Updike invented The Elaine

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Christopher J. Scalia tweeted that “John Updike invented The Elaine.” As Exhibit A he offered this description from Updike’s short story “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1958):

“There being no answer to Neil, I went into the living room, where Margaret, insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone. Somewhat in time to the music she would run a few steps, then snap her body like a whip, her chin striking her chest and her hands flying backward, fingers fanned, as her shoulders pitched forward.”

Click here to see The Elaine (GIF) 

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. After all, Seinfeld did tell The Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert in an interview that Updike’s hyper-detailed descriptions make him laugh “more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

“Updike, to me, was insane,” Seinfeld said. “I love microscopic acuity and I thought he was untouchable in that: the fineness, and the smallness of things that he would describe so well. . . . I mean, the Updike stuff is funny to me. You know, describing the circles of water under someone’s toes when they get out of the pool. That makes me laugh more than anything, that he would zero in on that.” That’s why Seinfeld said he’d choose Updike for one of the three writers, dead or alive, that he’d invite to a dinner party.

 

 

 

 

Was Updike anti-semitic or just mean spirited?

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Those who attended the joint Updike and Roth societies conference in Greenwich Village in October 2025 found two groups that, like their namesakes, were friendly rivals . . . mostly friendly. Only one person had an obvious axe to grind, which made members of both societies uncomfortable. And that person just published a well-written, thought-provoking article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Updike and the Jews.” Jesse Saich was reacting to Updike’s satirical Jewish alter-ego, Henry Bech, and the three volumes that allowed Updike to poke fun of the Jewish writers that he called the “chief glory” of postwar American fiction. Saich wondered,

“Why had Updike invented this de-Judaized Jew? ‘I find myself, in what should be an uncompetitive field, terribly jealous,’ Updike said in 1966. In a later interview, Updike was frank: All the attention paid to Jewish rivals annoyed him. ‘Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also.’ Reading the Bech stories, one senses another motive. ‘Your ideas are the product . . . of spite,’ a character tells Bech. ‘There is somebody you want to get even with.’ Bingo. Bech was a way of ‘working out various grudges,’ Updike confessed.”

But, as Saich admitted, “Even Updike’s detractors generally come around. ‘Long ago I wrote a nervous review of Bech for Commentary,’ Cynthia Ozick told Updike, offering apologies and congratulations (‘Mazel tov!’) on Updike’s Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, why not forgive? In every era, great writing springs from poisoned minds. Trollope disliked ‘low, disgusting Jews.’ Thackeray resented ‘sheenies.’ ‘What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.’ The author? None other than fair-minded George Orwell.

“A writer, Updike once said, is entitled to his bigotries. And so he was. Does that vitiate his art? Can we reject a novel’s morality but admire its beauty? I’ve always thought so, but now I’m not sure. On some level, reading entails submission to an author’s way of seeing. When we’re swept away, we become, for that moment, the author’s partner. In such complicity are the risks and rewards of great literature.”

Read the whole article

Updike, Irwin Shaw, P.K. Dick, and Joan Maple?

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In a recent blog-post musing, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, talked about picking up a copy of the LOA two-volume set of Updike’s Collected Stories and reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Which led him to recall a similarly titled story by Irwin Shaw, “Main Currents of American Thought,” which led him (come on, keep up!) to think that rather than having anything in common with Shaw, “Updike is similar to Philip K. Dick as a writer in that he takes the same few characters and recycles them through lots of similar situations.

“Dick has the pathetic lead character (‘Joe Chip’), the reliable older man (‘Runciter’), and the nagging wife (the sister in Confessions of a Crap Artist). Updike has the ‘Updike’ character (a student or young man in the early stories, then a young husband and father, then a divorcing middle-aged man, then a rueful man in late middle age, drifting among his own thoughts) along with various supporting characters.”

Which leads Gelman, finally, to, “I like lots of individual Updike stories but I’ve gotta say that the best are the Maples stories because these are the only ones where the woman character is as strong as the man. Joan gives as good as she gets.” Then back again to “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

Read the whole post

Award-winning travel writer visits Updike’s childhood home

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“I had a special link to John Updike, the celebrated writer who died in 2009. I once served as his muse,” began William Ecenbarger, who has won 17 writing awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. His latest feature, “John Updike’s Muse,” was published on April 3, 2026 by In The Know Traveler.

“It happened in 1983 when I was a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and sought an interview with Updike, whose publisher informed me never gave interviews. But a chance encounter with Linda Updike, his mother, broke the ice, and I ended up spending a full day with the author; mostly we drove around his boyhood haunts in Pennsylvania that served as settings for so much of his fiction.

“Several months after the interview a short story appeared in the New Yorker titled, ‘One More Interview,’ by John Updike. In it the main character, a famous actor, drives around his hometown with a journalist. Many of the events, even verbatim dialogue, were taken exactly from the real interview between me and Updike.

“Over the next four decades, I would learn as an Updike fan that he consistently used his experiences and surroundings as wellsprings for his fiction. And thus I was not surprised this year when I visited the recently opened John Updike Childhood Museum in Shillington, Pennsylvania.”

His guide this time was James Plath, president of The John Updike Society, who took him through the house that left a lasting impression on Updike and now contains many of his treasures, small and large. Upstairs, for example, Updike’s “tiny bedroom has his toys and books, ranging from Dumbo to the Lone Ranger, and some of the clothing he wore as a toddler.

A bowl of marbles was found under the floor boards here. A childhood friend had no recollection of playing marbles and said he and John would use slingshots to shoot them out the bedroom window.”

Photos:  Loose floorboards in young Updike’s bedroom removed during renovation, and the marbles that had been carefully placed in a “nest” beneath them.

Read the entire article

Berks County remembers John Updike

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WFMZ, which covers the Lehigh Valley and Berks County, published a piece today by historian Frank Whelan on “History’s Headlines: John Updike of Berks County.” Like Adam Begley’s biography, it begins with a story about journalist William Ecenbarger following the Updike trail in order to write a feature. Whelan’s article recounts how Ecenbarger went to the local library to ask for suggestions and ideas, only to encounter “an elderly woman in tortoise shell glasses” who told him, “I know all about him . . . . He’s my son.”

Whelan notes how that meeting led to his driving around Berks County with the author’s mother and getting the kind of tour freelancers can only dream about . . . which in turn led to his actually getting to take the same drive with Updike, whom he let drive his Volkswagen Rabbit.

Read the whole article

Michael Updike reads his father’s letters at an Ipswich event

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Michael Updike has been touring to promote Selected Letters of John Updike—as his father would have done, were he still with us. Interest in Updike has remained high in Ipswich, where the Updike’s lived for many years and where he wrote in an office on the second floor of the Caldwell Building.

Those who introduced him at The Ipswich Museum remarked how they had never seen the room so crowded, and Michael shared their marvel—especially, he noted, since it was a cold Super Bowl Sunday.

Those in attendance, and those who watch will especially enjoy the commentaries provided by Michael—starting with an explanation for the “garish” bull and bear necktie he wore, explaining that his father was invited to ring the bell to start the trading and was gifted the tie on that occasion.

Here is the link to the video recording.