Category Archives: Updike in Context

Tweeter says Updike invented The Elaine

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

“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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Updike podcast is up and running again

Posted on by
Reply

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’

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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’.”

Read the whole article

Ink Spill spotlights more Updike on Thurber

Posted on by
Reply

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.