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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Sometimes the most interesting takes on an author come from great thinkers outside the field of literature. Such is the case with an article by Kali DuBois that was published in Medium: “What If Gore Vidal and John Updike Had a Lovechild? Why Chop Dog-Eared These Pages Like a Hungry Man on a Cheeseburger Vagina.” 

“Gore Vidal and John Updike reshaped what it meant to be a man in America—and they did it from opposite ends of the battlefield,” wrote DuBois, who holds a Master’s degree in human sexuality and certifications in biological psychology, biofeedback, kinesiology, neuro-semantics, tantra, yoga, mind codes, and martial arts.

“Gore Vidal taught men that the personal was political, and that sex was never just about pleasure but about power. He forced men to see hypocrisy in the mirror, questioning the structures they benefitted from while often feeling trapped within them. He mocked American masculinity — its obsession with conquest, its fear of vulnerability, its addiction to empire — and invited men to see themselves not as rulers of the world but as products of it,” DuBois wrote.

“Vidal’s men were sharp, politically aware, often bisexual or morally fluid, understanding that identity was both a performance and a prison. He planted in men’s minds the belief that if you weren’t willing to challenge the system, you were part of it — and if you wanted freedom, you had to face uncomfortable truths about who you were, what you desired, and what you were complicit in.

“John Updike, meanwhile, told men it was okay to feel.

“His men were confused, lustful, terrified of aging, perpetually restless in their marriages, and looking for transcendence in the bodies of women they often did not deserve. Updike gave men permission to see their boredom, their longing, their sexual frustrations, not as shameful failings, but as a fundamental part of being alive.

“But he also left men with the belief that their inner turmoil was something the world should revolve around, that their dissatisfaction was profound, and that the search for pleasure and meaning in the domestic was a noble, if doomed, quest.

“Between them, these two men planted conflicting beliefs into American men:

• That sex is power (Vidal) and sex is salvation (Updike).
• That politics is personal (Vidal) and personal suffering is political enough (Updike).
• That masculinity is a performance to be deconstructed (Vidal) and masculinity is a tragic inheritance to be endured (Updike).

Men who read Vidal learned to distrust the system. Men who read Updike learned to distrust themselves. Together, they created a generation of men who wanted to be both aware and desired, critical and romantic, cynical and yearning.

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