Category Archives: Updike in Context

Updike included on American Purpose ‘favorite staff reads’ list

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American Purpose has a holiday tradition where editorial board members, contributing editors, and staff share their favorite reads from the past year. They call it “Turning the Page.”

Board member Adam Garfinkle, who is also founding editor of The American Interest and serves on the board of advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, chose John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies as his favorite read of 2022.

“John Updike’s 1996 bestseller In the Beauty of the Lilies has become part of the pantheon of fictive meditations on the thick sinews of Protestant Christianity that run deep and wide within the American body social and politic,” wrote Garfinkle, a former speech writer for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

“It tells a multigenerational family tale starting in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1905 and ending four generations and eighty years later in a Waco-like conflagration near Bighorn, Colorado. When I read the book a quarter century ago I marveled at Updike’s storytelling skills despite being unable to bond emotionally with any of the characters—rather like how I have since felt about Marilynne Robinson’s multigenerational Christological stories spread out in multiple books.

“This year’s deliberately slower second reading collided with my more mature ruminations on the wider topic of Protestantism’s shaping of a nation rushing through time, and itself being reshaped in the process. The collision revealed more of Updike’s prophetic shrewdness amid his formidable literary skills than I discerned the first time around. Now that we live truly in an age of spectacle, something still inchoate in 1996, the dancing demons and angels of the Protestant bequest to America appear far more vivid to me. The book didn’t change as time passed, but the reader did.”

Updike scholar George Hunt on the meaning of Christmas

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Updike fans know the name George Hunt from his early monograph, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art, but Hunt was also an ordained Jesuit priest who served as literary editor and then editor-in-chief of America magazine for 14 years. The current editor, James T. Keane, remembers Hunt and his associations with people like Updike and former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent in an article that draws heavily from Jesuit Father Hunt’s own words.

You’ll want to read the entire article, which also has a link to the essay “John Updike” Suspicious of Santa but fond of Christ.” We’ll end this post with pullout quotes from the article:

“George Hunt: If it is true, as Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world in the image of his Son.”

“George Hunt: What kind of an earth shall we pass on to our children? Shall it be one in which the Word would wish to be enfleshed?”

“George Hunt: As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word in the announcement means: I love you. Our answer must be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I will be there at your party.”

Blogger turns to Updike for Thanksgiving thankfulness

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Patrick Kurp, who writes Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life, yesterday turned to Updike for his Thanksgiving post, “Give Thanks for Gradual Ceaseless Rot.”

“Everything I have is more and better than I deserve,” Kurp wrote. “I like expressions of gratitude for things that have never occurred to me. Take John Updike’s thankfulness for decomposition in ‘Ode to Rot’:

“All process is reprocessing;
give thanks for gradual ceaseless rot
gnawing gross Creation fine while we sleep,
the lightning-forged organic conspiracy’s
merciful counterplot.”

Read the full blog post.

Nobel laureate cites Updike influence

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Turkish novelist and playwright Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, is now his country’s best-selling and most prominent writer. His books have sold more than 13 million copies internationally, with Snow, a novel that captures the sociopolitical milieu of 21st-century Turkey, drawing extra attention for its narrator, whom readers are meant to interpret as Pamuk himself.

Pamuk talked with The Saturday Paper writer Amal Awad about his most recent novel, Nights of Plague, which he began before the pandemic and which Awad described as a “historical murder mystery set on the imaginary Mediterranean island of Mingheria during an epidemic” of bubonic plague, adding “it’s Pamuk’s Moby-Dick, weighing in at nearly 700 pages.”

During their interview, Awad said that they talked “about criticism—both literary and hate speech—how the Turkish media is full of people expressing their hatred of him. ‘They haven’t read anything [I’ve written] and I’m proud to say that,’ Pamuk says, laughing. ‘If a literary criticism hurts, there are two criteria. One, it damages economically, the book won’t sell; that is very bad. And the other is you actually have a high opinion of this person and you want his approval.’

“Pamuk rarely worries about the latter nowadays,” Awad wrote, “but he says he has benefited from literary criticism and acknowledgment from his elders throughout his life. ‘John Updike made me famous in the United States,’ he says. ‘A critic who is 30 years older than me, made me in Turkey. There’s always been good, nice critics.'”

Read the whole article.

Writer finds inspiration in Updike’s Letter to a Baby Boomer

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A guest columnist for the Daily Post Athenian [Tenn.] was inspired by Updike’s essay “Letter to a Baby Boomer” to write “a similar epistle to my former students, who now range between the ages of 30 and 45.”

Stephen W. Dick, a teacher at Athens Junior High School from 1989-2005 and a baby boomer himself, wrote that in Updike’s “Letter to a Baby Boomer” [re: those born between 1946-1964], “Mr. Updike, born in 1932 and writing to the generation following his own, simultaneously challenges and reassures us. Of course, addressing any generation in its entirety involves significant generalization, but thinking of us baby boomers, I believe we could largely agree on how we are perceived, even if individually we don’t fit those perceptions.”

“According to Mr. Updike, we baby boomers, in our youth, ‘went to Woodstock, experienced altered states of consciousness, protested Vietnam, fought in it, or both.’

“In our adulthood, he writes that we ‘invented yuppieness, health consciousness, and corporate greed.’

“That stings, especially the last. Time always erodes youthful idealism, but my generation didn’t give it time to erode. We abruptly abandoned it, citing spouses and/or children as rationales, as if the future we once imagined couldn’t include families,” Dick wrote.

“In his conclusion to ‘Letter to a Baby Boomer,’ Updike quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero who, upon retiring, feared that ‘Every third thought shall be my grave.’

“Updike suggests the first two thoughts should be these: (1) Love one another, and (2) Seize the day. Those, I think, are beyond amendment.”

North Carolina pastor considers Updike’s remarks on the resurrection

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Raphael’s Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1502)

God’s Truth for Today published a short contemplation by Dr. Chris Simmons, a member of the pastoral team at Frye Regional Medical Center in Hickory on “Resurrection: Our Impossible Anchor — Faith and Values.” John Updike’s often-quoted “Seven Stanzas at Easter” were immediately invoked.

“At 28, novelist John Updike got to the bottom of the Resurrection,” Simmons wrote. “Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of this surely led him to write “Make no mistake: if He rose at all / it was His body; / if the cells dissolution did not / reverse, the molecules / reknit, the amino acids reignite, / the Church will fall.”

“Updike realized that the scandal of the resurrection, that a human could raise the dead, had to be true or the faith had to be abandoned. He wouldn’t want to make a metaphor out of it or redefine it or make it less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had conquered it himself,” Simmons wrote.

Read the whole meditation.

New England Historical Society article tells of the reaction to Updike’s Couples

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Participants in the 2nd Biennial John Updike Society Conference locate the second story office Updike rented in Ipswich above what was then known as the Blue Dolphin

In an article updated in 2022, the New England Historical Society wrote, “In 1968, John Updike blew the cover off a high-living, raucous little group of people in Ipswich, Mass., with the publication of his novel, Couples. The book told the graphic and salacious tale of the couples of Tarbox, Mass., who had made sex the focus of their lives.”

“John Updike in ‘Couples’ Titillated America with Tales of his Neighbors” noted that Updike “gave America a look at these upper-middle-class elites through their dinner party conversations and bedroom squabbles. He showed how they neglected their children. And, most shockingly, how they made swapping spouses in the bedroom a regular part of their lives.”

According to the historical society article, “John Updike, a former columnist to the local newspaper, tried his hand at damage control. He sent a letter to the paper flatly denying that Tarbox was Ipswich. But no one bought it.

“While politeness prevented much outright discussion of who was who, many in Updike’s circle seethed over his inclusion of their adventures in his work. They fumed partly because they didn’t want their behaviors known and partly because he had spoiled their fun.

“In the end, Updike found it convenient to head off on a European trip. Then he moved out of Ipswich altogether to the tonier environs of nearby Beverly Farms. But he would continue to visit Ipswich throughout his life, lunching at one of the downtown clubs and avoiding the scowls from some residents that would follow him until he died.”

Read the full article.

In Memoriam: Updike translator Javier Marías

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In an obituary for Legacy.com, Linnea Crowther wrote that Spanish novelist Javier Marías, “considered by many to be the greatest living Spanish writer,” died at his home in Madrid of pneumonia on September 11, 2022 at the age of 70.

Like Updike, Marías found literary acclaim early in life. Only 20 when his first novel, Los Dominios del Lobo (Dominions of the Wolf) was published, he wrote 16 more novels and numerous short stories and novellas. “He won the Fray Luis de León Translation Award for his translation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and he also translated works by authors including John Updike and Henry James.” And like Updike, he was widely considered to be a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature . . . an honor that would never come, but should have.

Read the full Legacy obituary.

McEwan talks about the assault on Rushdie and on literary reputations

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Lisa Allardice recently interviewed Ian McEwan for The Guardian (“Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: ‘It’s beyond the edge of human cruelty'”). The occasion was the release of Lessons, the new novel by McEwan, who was the keynote speaker at the 5th Biennial John Updike Society conference at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

McEwan at the University of Belgrade

The nearly 500-page novel, which mentions the fatwa against Rushdie, is “far longer than McEwan’s characteristically ‘short, smart and saturnine’ novels, as John Updike summed up in a 2002 review of Atonement,” Allardice wrote. “McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which ‘global events penetrate individual lives,’ of which the fatwa was a perfect example. ‘It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,’ he says.”

“Billed as ‘the story of a lifetime,’ it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. ‘I’ve always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels,’ he explains. ‘I thought, now I’m going to plunder my own life, I’m going to be shameless.'”

“‘I’ve read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards,’ he explains. ‘If you read Doris Lessing’s cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.'”

Asked whether, at age 75, he worries about his legacy, McEwan responded, “I’d like to continue to be read, of course. But again, that’s entirely out of one’s control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But I’ve had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they haven’t reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, ‘Start worrying about your legacy because it’s not looking good from here.'”

Allardice wrote, “He was greatly saddened by what he describes as ‘the assault on Updike’s reputation’; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. ‘Those problematic men who wrote about sex—Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.'”

“We’ve become so tortured about writing about desire. It’s got all so complex,’ he says. ‘But we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether it’s Flaubert you’re reading or even Jane Austen.'”

Read the whole interview.

John Updike had strong opinions about book design

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Carol Devine Carson, a designer at Alfred A. Knopf, summarized what it was like designing a book cover for John Updike: “He was very hands on,” she told Eye on Design writer Rachel Berger. “You had to learn what he liked in order to get anything approved.” Carson and designer Chip Kidd said Updike’s “likes” were consistent, Berger wrote. “For body copy, Janson of course. For jackets, Updike favored Albertus, a craggy Depression-era display face with tapering serifs resembling letters carved in metal, centered and in all caps. He loved certain shades of blue. He preferred 18-point type. Original art, yes. Contemporary photography, no. ‘He didn’t want to see too much letter spacing or type used in any kind of bizarre way,’ recalled Carson. ‘It was very straightforward,'” whereas Kidd and Carson’s design tastes were varied.

Chip Kidd’s design with Updike’s sticky note requested changes.

Updike’s first ambition was to become an artist, and all of his dust jackets proudly list the year he spent at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. Visitors to The John Updike Childhood Home can see numerous examples of his work.

What did Kidd, a Reading native who was a keynote speaker at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference, think of Updike’s design sensibilities? Consider the famous dust jacket for Rabbit, Run, which Updike designed. “What about that cover suggests middle class suburbia?” Kidd wondered. “Unless I’m missing something, conceptually it doesn’t mean anything”—those patterned thin yellow, green and blue stripes with a large circle in the center.

“I would call Updike’s design taste very conservative,” Kidd told Berger, contrasting it with his own aesthetic, which was “just completely all over the place.” Berger wrote that Kidd and Updike occasionally “butted heads,” with one letter to editor Judith Jones “requesting ‘no Kiddian theatrics, please’ for an upcoming title.”

Read the full article