Category Archives: Updike in Context

Ian McEwan talks about the Updike influence

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In a Culture segment for Five Books, novelist Ian McEwan “talks about the books that have helped shape his own—from the biography of a scientific genius to a treatise on the end of time—and the importance of finding ‘mental freedom.'”

Here are the exchanges having to do with the Updike influence:

Would you go to Updike for sex, if not Larkin?
I think some of the descriptions of sex in Updike are extraordinary. I could never follow him down his route because his gift is one I’ve never hoped to emulate, which is the visual. In a sense he almost debunks or destroys the thing he’s describing, because of his clinical eye, but it does take my breath away. In this realm he’s a master of the hyper-real.

Talk a little about John Updike if you will, who died not long ago, in 2009. Your third book is Rabbit at Rest, the fourth of his ‘Rabbit’ novels.
Updike has been a very important writer for me, the one I’ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often. I was deeply touched by his death. I felt that we had conversations unfulfilled – we got to know each other a little in the last six or seven years of his life, and we had a correspondence.

What was he like, his character?
He was impenetrably courteous. At first, quite difficult to get beyond his very gentlemanly, polite and considerate shell. He protected himself. Behind this shell was all of his work. It was easier to get a more intimate Updike by writing letters. If I wrote, I’d get a response by return of post, apologising for being so quick, just as I would be apologising for my delayed replies. He said it was the only way he could keep his desk clear. But of course it was not that at all. This was a highly organised mind with boundless creative energy. He could turn in 1200 words of fiction in a day, write a review or an essay, and still address his correspondence.

You’ve called him ‘the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death’. What is it about Updike that deserves that praise?
Great sentence-maker; extraordinary noticer; wonderful eye for detail; great fondler of details, to use Nabokov’s phrase. Huge comic gift, finding its supreme expression in the Bech trilogy. A great chronicler, in the Rabbit tetralogy, of American social change in the 40 years spanned by those books. Ruthless about women, ruthless about men. (Feminists are wrong to complain. There’s a hilarious streak of misanthropy in Updike). He reminds us that all good writing, good observation contains a seed of comedy. A wonderful maker of similes. His gift was to render for us the fine print, the minute detail of consciousness, of what it’s like in a certain moment to be another person, to inhabit another mind. In that respect, Angstrom will be his monument.

You say feminists are wrong to criticise him, but there is that criticism – that he has a ‘male gaze’. Do you face the same challenges when you write female characters?
I have done occasionally. It means nothing to me. This is a visual form. Remember Conrad’s exhortations in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: ‘I am trying…by the power of the written word…to make you see.’

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom was, I gather, an inspiration for Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar?
I crouched in Updike’s shadow. I set myself the problem of having an unsympathetic hero, and enticing a reader to stay in his company for the length of a novel. With Rabbit, Updike showed us how this is achieved. Rabbit is not the nicest of men, his is a narrow consciousness, he’s of limited education, deeply ungenerous in the private life – remember how he makes love to his son’s wife? Grumpy, irritable, bigoted in some respects, and yet somehow Updike succeeds in making him the prism through which 40 years of American social change is observed, and 40 years of close shifts within family relations, adulterous affairs and the tragedy of a lost child.
How does he do this? Well, he invents an altered or heightened realism. He gives Rabbit his own – Updike’s – thoughts, and yet somehow he makes them plausibly Rabbit’s. Rabbit has reflections on mortality that could only be, in any realistic frame, Updike’s. But he makes them Rabbit’s; he shoehorns them into this limited mental space. It’s a rhetorical trick. In short, what Updike succeeds in doing is to make Rabbit interesting. He might not be good, but he’s interesting, and we travel with him for that reason alone. I can’t claim for a moment to have come anywhere near this with Michael Beard, but that was the example at my side.

When I feel my faith flagging in the whole enterprise of fiction – and all writers experience this – a few pages of Updike will restore my energies and optimism.

“Ian McEwan recommends Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels”

Essay on Dylan Thomas references Updike

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In “Poetics in the Fiction of Dylan Thomas,” published in North of Oxford, Ray Greenblatt notes how in A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1952) “Thomas’ poetic style is revealed in the prose as well: vivid imagery, alliteration, purposeful run-on lines, many adjectives, humor, strong emotions from joy to sadness. In most of these stories Dylan is his own narrator; we even observe him growing up from his pre-teens into a young man in his twenties . . . . Thomas writes impressionistic stories about his life (or at least about a boy named Dylan) in Wales.”

“Dylan Thomas died so young, but in his short life he excelled in poetry and short fiction. One hears echoes of James Joyce in Thomas’ emotional display of young characters’ feelings of love. Thomas would undoubtedly have read this Celtic forerunner whose work began to dominate the world in 1916 with his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yet, Thomas’ prose in turn influenced American writers who came after him. J.D. Salinger, in Europe during World War Two, could have read Thomas. Salinger employed American colloquialisms used by the young as Thomas did the British. And another echo is heard in the writing of John Updike who attended Oxford in 1954, just after Thomas’ death. Updike often describes the woodlands and the sea in his work against which young people interact. We can only conjecture what further influences Dylan Thomas might have disseminated to the literary world had he lived longer.”

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike reviewed

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Kathleen Verduin has written a review of John McTavish‘s Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought, calling the book “a kind of bricolage: revisions and expansions of essays and reviews McTavish published since the 1970s in such venues as Theology Today, the United Church Observer, and the Huntsville Forester; reprints of articles by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton from the Christian Century and Radix; an interview with Updike appearing originally in the magazine Episcopal Life; previously collected memorial tributes by the poet J.D. McClatchy and Updike’s son David; and a selection of reminiscences solicited from various readers of Updike . . . about how they first encountered the author and why he attracted them.

“Still, it seems to me that such an anomalous makeup makes this a publication of interest. Looked at on its own terms, McTavish’s book bears witness to half a century of authentic engagement with a writer he calls ‘one of the few literary links with the historic Christian faith’—and thus provides a diachronic record of Updike’s reception . . . among literate Christians exhilarated by a gifted artist who, as Michael Novak wrote in 1963, was ‘beginning to make religion intelligible in America.'”

Read the full review.

If you missed it: David Foster Wallace’s famous slam on Updike

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Literary Hub today reminded readers of the late novelist David Foster Wallace‘s famous attack on John Updike and “the Great Male Narcissists” in his 1997 review of Toward the End of Time, published originally in the Observer. In fact, they posted the entire review, in case you missed it.

In his review, Wallace begins, “Mailer, Updike, Roth—the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”

Toward the End of Time Wallace calls “the worst” of the 25 Updike books he’d read to date, “a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”

In the same review he talks about literary readers he knows and admits they are all under 40, and “none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason—mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back: ‘Just a penis with a thesaurus.'”

Sounds like penis (with a thesaurus) envy. Read the full review.

Are cigarettes and golf transcendent for writers?

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A book review of Gregor Hens’s Nicotine written for The Atlantic begins,

“Writers have long found rich fodder for their work in their leisure pursuits. John Updike, writing about golf in The New York Times in 1973, described the pastime as ‘a non-chemical hallucinogen’ that ‘breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria.’ Sketching out a particularly lucid paragraph about the act of preparing for a stroke, he confessed, ‘got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed.’

“Updike’s experience of transcendence while playing golf—his sense of tapping in to a kind of acute concentration that alters perception—is echoed vividly in the German writer Gregor Hens’s new memoir of sorts, Nicotine,” reviewer Sophie Gilbert writes.

Nicotine, she says, “enters a kind of sub-genre of literary memoirs focused around a single practice or obsession, in which the object or activity enables the writer to achieve sharper focus, heightened consciousness, and creative fire. Like Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Updike’s writing on golf, it illuminates the writerly quest for the elusive state the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi named, simply, ‘flow.’ Smoking, Hens seems to believe, transformed him into a writer by expanding his sense of what was real and what was perceivable. It physically and irreparably altered the pathways in his brain. And it punctuated and constructed the order of his professional life.”

Read the full review.

Trump, Russia, Rabbit and golden showers?

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49473197-cachedDonald Trump is in the news again (still), this time with media outlets reporting on new allegations regarding the president-elect, his ties to Russia, and a bizarre twist some in the Twittersphere are calling “#watersportsgate.” In a story titled “Americans Deserve to Know the Specific Allegations on Trump and Russia; Trump’s sex life is his own affair. But his ties to foreign autocrats—whether Russian, Chinese, or Emirati—should have been fully aired long before now,” written for The Nation by D.D. Guttenplan, the author writes about a newly revealed dossier that “accuses Trump and his campaign of knowingly conspiring with Putin’s government to influence the U.S. election in his favor, in return for an explicit promise ‘to sideline Russian intervention in the Ukraine as a campaign issue.'” The dossier also contained information of a more personal nature, that had some wondering whether it was appropriate for public dissemination.

“But once the dossier was in circulation, among not only reporters on the intelligence and campaign beats but also politicians, intelligence officials, and law-enforcement agents—with President Obama and President-elect Trump both given official briefings on its contents—then yes, the people do have a right to know not just in summary terms but in detail what has been alleged. Even when those details include sexual conduct that many Americans (and the British daytime-television audience) might find shocking—unless, that is, they were fans of John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, which introduced “golden showers” into the (pardon the expression) mainstream way back in 1981.

“Diverting as the details are—and given what Trump has not just admitted but boasted of doing in the past, such practices, even if true and captured for posterity by the FSB, are hardly likely to disqualify him—the central questions remain fundamentally political. Because Trump’s resemblance to a broken clock—right about the need to restore American manufacturing, and to seek common ground with Russia on issues ranging from Iran to nuclear proliferation to combating ISIS; wrong on just about everything else—isn’t just a problem for the left. Bernie Sanders seems to have figured out a way to challenge Trump without playing into the narrative of elitist derision; the rest of us are still struggling.”

Anyone struggling to grasp the meaning of the expression “golden showers” might turn to an article written for The Daily Beast on “Wet and Wild: The History of ‘Golden Showers’; ‘Germaphobe’ Donald Trump denied being turned on by ‘golden showers.’ But the sexual practice has an endless stream of other fans.” In it, Lizzie Crocker writes,

“At the end of John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, the novel’s prejudiced, patriotic, angsty, lust-crazed protagonist urinates on his wife’s friend—who, in turn, urinates on him—during a vacation to Puerto Rico.

“The golden shower is an unorthodox sexual activity even for Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, whose very nickname evokes an impulsive, frenetic creature with an undiscerning sexual appetite.

“President-elect Trump has insisted he’s never read the book, but given his contempt for the truth and the now-infamous, unverified report that he enjoys being peed on, one wonders if our soon-to-be POTUS’s particular sexual proclivity was inspired by Updike’s fictional American everyman?”

 

Writer offers Brief Survey of the Great American Novel(s)

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You’ve heard the debate. Probably participated, as well. Is there a Great American Novel?

literary-map-of-us-america-reads-anthologyEmily Temple, writing for Lit Hub, takes readers back to 1868 when John William DeForest “coined the now inescapable term ‘the great American novel’ in the title of an essay in The Nation—a term he defined as representing “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” DeForest thought that the Great American Novel hadn’t been written yet, but since his early speculation there’s been no shortage of “contenders.”

Temple assembles a list of the usual suspects plus a few unique ones, among them (of course) John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (or rather, the collective Rabbit tetralogy). She blurbs each entry with a learned quote. For Updike it’s one from Troy Patterson written for Slate in 2009: “To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you’d be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.”

Other contenders on Temple’s non-exhaustive list are:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
U.S.A., John Dos Passos
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Light in August, William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
These Dreams of You, Steve Erickson
The Flame Throwers, Rachel Kushner

Updike wrote to oppose John Lennon deportation

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screen-shot-2016-12-11-at-6-38-17-pmA City Pages article on music by Jay Boller titled “Hey Prude: How one penis-fearing Minnesotan tipped the FBI to John Lennon” tells of the reaction that started an FBI file that grew until it deportation became a threat for the former Beatle. Featuring himself and mate Yoko Ono naked on the album cover for Two Virgins (1968) was only the beginning. It was his anti-war voice that was the loudest and his involvement with experimental drug-use that gave the FBI its opening.

However, “Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan would join dozens of rational stars—including Jasper Johns, Joan Baez, and John Updike—in writing letters of support for Lennon to the INS, which began deportation efforts in 1972.

For the whole story, click here.

Updike mentioned in short story collection

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dontcoverIn Don’t I Know You?, writer Marni Jackson presents a collection of linked stories detailing the exploits of fictional writer Rose McEwan, with an author’s note explaining the fine line between fiction and reality:  “These stories are works of fiction” infused with “autobiographical elements”? But hasn’t it always been so?

As reviewer Philip Marchand notes, “The stories are of two kinds: the first, the predominant strain, are plausible narratives in which one can easily imagine the celebrity in question. ‘Doon,’ which launches the collection, introduces Rose as an adolescent writer taking a creative writing course taught by a scarcely older young man, one John Updike. Here is the first challenge faced by Jackson: how to create a character convincing in its outlines, compared to the ‘real’ person bearing that name.

“It can be delicate. In the story featuring Bob Dylan, the author must ponder mundane details and make them convincing. For example, how does the great Bob Dylan brush his teeth? Jackson must decide. ‘For several minutes he scoured his teeth over the kitchen sink, brushing and spitting methodically,’ she writes. Does he floss? Yes, asserts Jackson. ‘Then he flossed, making the thread pock rhythmically.’

“Updike reveals himself in a different way. Watching Rose sew, his curiosity is aroused by the white trim along the bottom of her sleeveless top. ‘I like that,’ he says. But he is a writer: it is not enough for something to catch his fancy—it must have a name. And what does this object call itself? ‘Rickrack,’ she tells Updike.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Jackson did lift ‘rickrack’ from the great mass of Updike prose. . . .

“In ‘Doon’ and ‘Free Love’ the celebrities are more witnesses than participants, although Updike does play a significant part in Rose’s growth and development. (‘I didn’t think playfulness and humor were allowed,’ she states at one point, and it is not hard to see the hand of Updike in this revelation.) . . . .”

Here’s the full review:  “Meet Leonard Cohen the ice cream vendor and Keith Richards the surgeon in Marni Jackson’s Don’t I Know You?”

Updike on the cover of a sex manual?

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In a category that can only be termed “random news,” John Updike and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke are both featured on the cover of an Iranian sex manual titled Marital and Sexual Problems in Men. Though the story is recent, based on a Tehran tweeter, the book itself was spotted three years ago by journalist Sobhan Hassanvand. Updike would no doubt be amused, not only by the cover but by what passes for “news” on the Internet. Updike’s pose seems to be from a promo shot from his collection of short stories, Trust Me. Here’s the story link.

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