Category Archives: Updike in Context

Updike’s Couples makes a reading list on transformative love

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Literary Hub recently published a recommended reading list “From Eve Babitz to Raven Leilani, Readings on Solipsistic, Transformative Love” by Lillian Fishman. Surprisingly, Updike’s 50-year-old novel Couples makes the list. Fishman writes,

“A novel apparently about sex, Couples is actually about something much more interesting: how adultery itself—’its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master’—can breathe life into a prematurely settled existence. Though he describes a number of affairs among the couples of Tarbox, Updike follows most closely behind Piet, whose womanizing is never premediated but who falls into one affair-adventure after another, believing his talent is that he genuinely loves every woman he touches. Sincere and special in the way it expresses how we explain ourselves to ourselves, and deeply forgiving of our failings, especially when they occur in the service of reanimating a life.

Also recommended are books by Raven Leilani, Annie Ernaux, Eve Babitz, Celia Paul, Peter Stamm, Kathleen Collins, and Sheila Heti. Fishman, who was born nearly 30 years after Couples was published, is the author of Acts of Service (Hogarth Press).

Updike’s Witches are reappraised 330 years after Salem

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In “Revisiting The Witches of Eastwick 330 Years After Salem” for the Chicago Review of Books, Chicago-based writer Sara Batkie writes, “Fifty-odd years ago, covens were the locus of Satanic activity in such movies and books as Rosemary’s Baby and Suspiria. But the rise of second-wave feminism and women in the workforce in the late ’70s and early ’80s gave way to a gentler, more domestic spellcaster, a trend arguably initiated by John Updike’s 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick and the film adaptation three years later.”

After giving credit where she thinks credit is due, Batkie offers a refrain that’s familiar to Updike readers: “Most of his previous work was steeped in middle class realism, bound by such earthly concerns as which friend’s wife to sleep with and the masculine urge to escape from familial obligations. The inner lives of women were not often foregrounded, to put it generously, though Updike was one of our most skilled sensualists, and it’s clear he admired the ‘fairer sex,’ even if he didn’t always understand them.”

Batkie suggests that maybe Updike added witchcraft to his first real attempt to write about the inner lives of women in order to “hedge his bets. If something didn’t ring true to his female readership, it could be attributed to the three women’s unique powers.”

Batkie gives the film higher marks than the novel when 2022 feminism is the standard, but concludes, “So where does that leave us today, post-third-wave and likely post-Roe? Though neither Updike nor [director George] Miller set out to predict our fracturing present, both versions of The Witches of Eastwick now feel like a warning, or at least a precaution. Magic has its limits, both personally and politically. A woman’s right to bodily autonomy is no longer a fringe belief, no matter what men in power like Alito might think.”

Batkie is the author of Better Times: Short Stories, which won the 2017 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Read her whole Chicago Review of Books essay here.

Fellow psoriasis sufferer cites Updike’s bravery

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In a review for The Guardian [U.K.], “Skin by Sergio del Molino review—a meditation on psoriasis and the psyche; A sufferer writes about how the skin condition affected figures as diverse as Joseph Stalin, John Updike and Cyndi Lauper,” Houman Barekat notes that del Molino was 21 when he first experienced psoriasis symptoms.

Barekat summarizes the affliction: “a chronic autoimmune condition that causes an overproduction of epidermal cells, resulting in scaling on the surface of the skin” that “appear in red blotches that sometimes crack and bleed.” Barekat identifies the accompanying related symptoms—arthritis, back pain, chronic fatigue—and zeroes in on del Molino’s contrast between the way that the disease affected Stalin (and his two henchmen who also had psoriasis) and Updike:

“Conversely, on a happier note, Updike credited his psoriasis as the driving force of his talent, remarking in his memoirs that: ‘Whenever in my timid life I have shown some courage and originality it has been because of my skin.'”

Updike famously wrote about his psoriasis in “At War with My Skin,” which was first published in The New Yorker and then became one of the central essays in Self-Consciousness: A Memoir (1989). Handwritten jottings that appear to be the start of the essay are on display at The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.

Del Molino also referred to Updike in his Dec. 16, 2021 opinion piece that was published in The New York Times: “Very few dared to write in any depth about their illness. John Updike is one exception. He dedicated a novel and part of his memoirs to psoriasis, and it was thanks to those that I became aware of my own monstrous nature. I wrote a book to explain myself through these figures. My life, like theirs, is governed by my skin condition.” Part of that quote appears as well in del Molino’s first-person account written for Asharq Al-Awsat on Dec. 25, 2021 titled “What Makes Me a Monster.”

Edward Sorel paints a devilish portrait of Vidal, Updike, and Roth

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John Updike’s two Time magazine cover portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery, but he’s also depicted on The Laureates of the Lewd, a 1993 pastel by Edward Sorel that was created as an original illustration for a Gentleman’s Quarterly article.

From the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website:
“Sorel’s three roguish satyrs—Gore Vidal, John Updike, and Philip Roth—were gamboling around the literary landscape making mischief and money in the late 1960s. As James Atlas pointed out in his Gentleman’s Quarterly article “The Laureates of the Lewd,” Updike’s 1968 book Couples, followed by Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the literary side of the Sexual Revolution to a new level of uncensored candor. American erotic life was out in the open again, in all its complexity and variety. But these books were as much about disillusionment as sex, reflecting the turmoil of generational conflict, a revolution in birth control, a controversial war, protests, assassinations, and race riots. Roth himself noted that if Portnoy’s Complaint had not appeared at the end of a decade ‘marked by blasphemous defiance of authority and loss of faith in the public order, I doubt that a book like mine would have achieved such renown in 1969.'”

Banned books: Updike’s Rabbit is in good company

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Unsurprisingly, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is banned in many schools. But so is George Orwell’s Animal House, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—all books, like Rabbit, Run, that were once taught in schools without protest.

But when books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Bill Martin Jr./Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web also make the banned books list, it sends a message more disturbing than the act of censorship: it’s sad proof that American minds are narrowing more than ever before.

Here’s an article on “45 Books You Read in School That Are Banned Now,” which was published in Earn Spend Live.

Updike turns up on new HBOMax Julia Child series

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To readers of John Updike, Judith Jones is well known as the author’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf. But before she worked for Knopf, Jones was known as the one who pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of the rejection pile at Doubleday. And at Knopf, while she was establishing a relationship with Updike, she was also championing Julia Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Jones (played by Fiona Glascott) features prominently as a character on the new HBOMax series Julia, a fictionalized account of how Child got her start at WGBH-TV, Boston’s PBS station. The first three episodes dropped on March 31, 2022. According to the cast list at the Internet Movie Database, Updike doesn’t make an appearance. But in the first three episodes Jones’ other “project” is frequently mentioned: as the author of Rabbit, Run, as a new bright star in the Knopf universe, as a writer having a “crisis” Jones suspects is merely a ploy for a free lunch, and as the originator of a manuscript she’s editing on the WGBH set while she multitasks.

Sarah Lancashire stars in the title role, with Frazier alums David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwirth appearing as Child’s husband and best friend, respectively. Dale Place plays Alfred Knopf. So far the series has an 8.1 rating out of 10 from IMDB.com viewers and critics.

UPDATE: In Episode 4, a bespectacled Updike finally makes an appearance, played by Bryce Pinkham. Pinkham was an original cast member of the Broadway shows A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Ghost: The Musical, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. He also appeared in the PBS series Mercy Street.

Glascott as Judith Jones, with Pierce playing Paul Child
Bryce Pinkham as John Updike on a WGBH interview program in the HBOMax series Julia

Article on banned books includes Rabbit, Run (of course)

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Suzanna Bowling, who co-owns and publishes the newspaper Times Square Chronicles, penned and posted an article titled “Book Banning: What Is This Nazism?” that includes Updike’s Rabbit, Run . . . though other books on her list have sparked more outrage.

Bowling’s annotated list includes specifics on the bans, challenges, and restrictions that have been directed at such books as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Beloved, Of Mice and Men, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, A Farewell to Arms, Invisible Man, Song of Solomon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Jungle, and All the King’s Men. In other words, great, classic American literature.

Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, was “challenged in many communities,” banned in the cities of Rochester, Levittown, North Jackson, and Lakeland, and burned in Drake, N.D.

Rabbit, Run, by contrast, got off easy. It was banned in Ireland from 1962-67, restricted to high school students with parental permission in the six Aroostock County, Maine community high school llibraries, and removed from the required reading list for English Class at Medicine Bow Junior High School in Wyoming.

Though Banned Books Week isn’t until September 18-24, 2022, if you’re looking to get an early start on your reading or rereading list, here’s the full story. Bowling suggests that everyone might encourage their local bookstores (and for that matter, libraries) to show support for banned books during Banned Books Week.

Literary Hub recommends the best Bard reimaginings

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Last week Literary Hub ran an article “On Reimagining the Infinite Dramatic Scope of Shakespeare and His Immortal Characters,” in which Kathryn Barker recommended “five cracking titles that rework the Bard’s famous plays.”

It will come as no surprise to fans of John Updike that Gertrude and Claudius made the list. Of Updike’s imaginative historical novel, Barker wrote, “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet kicks off with a powder-keg dynamic for its titular character—his father is dead and his mother has married his uncle. But how did things get so complicated? In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike explores the lives of Hamlet’s mother, father, and uncle before the Prince of Denmark vowed his revenge and took center stage. A prequel that ends just after the start of Shakespeare’s play, this ambitious novel gives insights into characters who—in the original text—were largely supporting.”

Other novels that made the list: I, Iago by Nicole Galland; Ophelia by Lisa Klein; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard; and I Am Juliet, by Jackie French.

Barker might have included her own Waking Romeo, now available from Amazon, because it too is a retelling of a Shakespeare classic.

Former minister says Updike all but told his story

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In an opinion piece for Baptist News, David Ramsey contemplated “Atheism and agnosticism: The last closet,” which began,

“In 1996, John Updike released his 17th novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, a story about a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, who loses his faith, leaves the ministry and becomes an encyclopedia salesman. In a strange case of art imitating life, Updike was narrating my story. I was a Baptist minister who had slowly been losing my faith. That same year, I left the ministry and embarked on a second career in technology sales.

“While Updike captured my painful but liberating movement from Christianity to agnosticism, he failed to narrate the stigma and stereotypes associated with being an agnostic or atheist,” Ramsey wrote.

“Last year, I wrote a book in which I discuss my journey from minister to agnostic and critique popular religious notions like ‘everything happens for a reason.’ I have friends who have reviewed my book online, some of whom masked their names to avoid being outed by their association with a controversial topic and agnostic writer,” Ramsey said.

Read the whole opinion piece.

New NY Times book editors share book criticism favorites

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In an article titled “Times Critics Discuss 2021 in Books, From Breakout Stars to Cover Blurbs,” new critics Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs were asked if they had any all-time favorite books of criticism that they would recommend people “delve into over the holidays.”

Jacobs replied, “John Updike’s Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs are the bookends of my Updike Shelf (about which, another time). Here was someone who didn’t have to review or consider his contemporaries or predecessors, and yet industriously, prolifically did. What generosity.”

When Young weighed in with “Martin Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché. His flow is insane,” Jacobs said, “Wait, I meant to say that! Well, Amis has written about Updike and Updike about Martin’s father, Kingsley, so maybe this is a male literary turducken . . . .”