Category Archives: Updike in Pop Culture

‘New Yorker’ celebrates Ted Williams (and John Updike)

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As part of a grand centennial year celebration, an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour featured “Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game,” a remembrance that “naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. ‘Marginal differences really matter,’ she says. ‘And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.’

Excerpts from ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ by John Updike, were read by Brian Morabito.”

Are the days of males writing about fictionalized divorce angst over?

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Helen Brown, writing for The Telegraph, explained “Why men can’t write about divorce any more”: as Lyz Lenz summarized, “there is an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface.”

“Fifty years ago, it was men who dominated the divorce genre, often pouring their own domestic woes in novelistic form as an act of retribution. John Updike wrote 18 short stories about a fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple (later collected and published as The Maple Stories) who divorced in mid-life. . . . Philip Roth (who died in 2018) was famously accused ofpillorying his second wife, British actress Claire Bloom in his fiction.”

Read the whole article.

New Yorker at 100 revisits Updike’s ‘Hub Fans’

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The New Yorker celebrates its centennial in 2025 and the literary party is going on all year long. On March 9, Louisa Thomas wrote about the significance of John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which a subhead noted was “described as the best piece about baseball The New Yorker ever printed.”

Thomas wrote, “On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, ‘falling in love, away from marriage,’ took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base.
He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. ‘It was in the books while it was still in the sky,’ Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. Updike captured not only the ball’s trajectory and its monumental effect but also the moment’s mix of jubilation and relief.”
Thomas added that “it was Updike’s insight to see that everyone had expected [the last-bat home run], and in fact it was that shared expectation that held them in their seats. . . . So much of the best sportswriting since then bears the hallmarks of Updike’s example: an elegant, natural tone; precise, surprising descriptions; pacing that neither impedes the drama nor does too much to drive it.”

Writer suggests Updike invented Brat culture

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Could John Updike be responsible for, or at least on the cutting edge of a cultural shift toward individualism? English columnist and writer Sarah Ditum was inclined to think so. Born roughly 50 years after Updike, Ditum wrote in unHerd that Harry Angstrom’s problem was “the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man living in 1959, when John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run is set.” In the late 1950s, she wrote, “making the passage from youth to adulthood in your twenties was not merely possible—it was compulsory. In a culture that was tentatively embracing personal freedom, (marriage, a job, and a first child at 23) could feel more like prison than possibility.”

Ditum reminded readers of the impetus behind Updike’s writing of the novel: “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957, and without reading it, I resented its apparent injunction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.”

Rabbit’s run, Ditum suggested, was “less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass-media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when he gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show” and “Rabbit is appalled at the banality. . . . His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.”

“It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side-product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realization. An age of personal freedom, carved against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. . . . Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.”

Bottom line? “The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit—”know yourself”—becomes its inverse: be knowable to the world. And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.”

Read the whole essay.

Updike’s Of the Farm is now an apple cider

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Literary tourism just took a flavorful turn.

Phoenixville (Chester County) Pa.’s Excursion Ciders “uses local apples that are presssed and made in-house, also utilizing other locally-grown ingredients to make their drinks. Currently, the star of the show is Of the Farm: Core. This cider has an ABV of 7.5 percent and is made with apples from Plowville Orchard. Author John Updike spent time there and they named this cider after his novel, Of the Farm.” Here’s the link to the full story.

Of course, Weaver’s Orchard in Morgantown is the Updike site in Plowville for apples. The Updikes sold land to the Weavers, and one of the Weaver family owns and lives in the Updike ancestral farmhouse in Plowville and also spoke to our members at two conferences.

Keillor on leaving home, mementos, and Updike

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Keillor at the 2016 Updike conference with society president James Plath

The New Hampshire Union Leader recently published “Garrison Keillor: The art of leaving home.” Keillor, who was the keynote speaker at the 4th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, S.C., wrote, “The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glassing sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well.”

Keillor wrote that he kept “artifacts of a long life. . . . I kept all these and other souvenirs. I never listened to the show [A Prairie Home Companion] myself and I have no memorabilia from it. It would only give me remorse that the show wasn’t better than it was. John Updike told me once that he rather enjoyed reading his early work but then he was a naturally cheerful man, rare for an author. Critics resented him for that and gave him grudging reviews; they preferred writers who had suffered, been imprisoned, exiled, or at least had abusive fathers. John was too American. There wasn’t much Russian or Spanish about him. He wrote because he was good at it and he knew it.

“And now in my old age I’ve found useful work as a stand-up cheerleader for adult cheerfulness, the basic goodness of life, a counter-voice to the diversity cops and agony aunts who’ve taken over publishing, journalism, public radio and TV, and much of academia. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is stupidity on toast; the real problem with MacWoke is its penchant for dismal pessimism, its humorlessness. I grew up with fundamentalists who looked forward to the end of the world and now progressives do too.”

In a March 13, 2024 column for the New Hampshire Union Leader, “Mature man available for speaking, easy terms,” Keillor cited Updike again:  “And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, ‘Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.'”

Updike’s Couples in the news again?

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The Gothamist recently published a small news-muse item about an establishment in Berlin, Connecticut that was “busted for violating the town’s ordinances on sexually oriented businesses.”

Couple swapping is apparently legal there, but not charging an entry fee for swingers. “Gotta love suburbia,” The Gothamist wrote, adding, “John Updike literally wrote the book on couple swapping: Couples. And The Ice Storm featured key parties and wife-swapping (read the book or watch the film).”

Influential German musician cites Updike as an influence

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A Time News entertainment piece spotlighted Bernd Begemann, a “‘boy from the provinces,’ as he never tires of emphasizing, from East Westphalia to be more precise. He was also the first punk in Bad Salzuflen. Tocotronic and all the economic champions of the Hamburg school would be unthinkable without Begemann and his urban folk-electro album called Rezession, Baby! from 1993. He is a pioneer and also a bit of a knight of the sad figure, he gallops through the musical landscape with his own unshakable personality, always a tip of his nose ahead, often a gallop too far.”

“In more than 20 albums and over 400 songs, he sings of love, preferring to be ‘twice second choice’ to being content with the monotony of monogamy. . . . The man in the gold silk shirt is a charmer and a crooner wild at heart and somehow, thanks to generosity, also a feminist, because he leaves women spoiled for choice in song and life. He admires Bert Kaempfert and offers Berlin, Passing, Barmstedt and Ostfildern insights into what is not so loud and garish in life: a big heart, a noble spirit, drama and cappricci. He sharpened his senses as a reader of Balzac, Updike and, quite gallantly, Prince Valiant, as he explains . . . . “

On John Updike, he said:

“A brilliant writer who seems unread today, which is a shame. Maybe because the kind of relationship his books are about doesn’t seem to exist anymore. But of course the patterns in monogamous couple relationships are still the same, they are the sweet futilities embedded in the structure of a neighborhood, a city, an economic cycle. John Updike shows us this with ease. He’s basically the Blueprint for Jonathan Franzen and so on.

“I think 1968’s Couples is Updike’s first big hit book, before the Rabbit series. At the time it was a silent revolution. There are no loud things happening in the book, no big explosions, no train derailments. He says how we live – and that’s breathtaking and that’s very dangerous, even though it looks so ordered. I appreciate the book very much.”

Daiquiri recipe article cites a Rabbit, Run passage

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Given an article about the daiquiri, it would be reasonable for a lover of literature to expect to read about Ernest Hemingway and one of his two favorite Havana, Cuba bars: La Floridita, “Cradle of the Daiquiri cocktail.” The Floridita is here as a vintage photograph, but the writer mentioned isn’t “Papa” Hemingway, who is commemorated in a statue at that bar. Instead, the writer is John Updike.

In “The Spirits #17: The Cardamon Daiquiri,” Richard Godwin offered the recipe and added, “If you haven’t ever made a basic Daiquiri, please do so immediately – follow the recipe minus the cardamon. I figure with winter, you either need to lean into it or run away from it. Run away run away run away run away run away!” Which, of course, led him to Rabbit Angstrom.

“There’s a memorable double-date scene in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, where our protagonist Harry Angstrom orders a Daiquiri in a Chinese restaurant because both of the girls have. He imagines it will taste like limeade…and finds it does sort of taste like limeade, ‘riding like oil on a raw transparent taste.’ He has a few more and when he emerges, ‘the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is light-hearted, and skips once, to get in step with the girl he adores.’

“Like Updike’s midcentury hero, the Daiquiri (rum, lime, sugar) is simple and direct but capable of the greatest lyricism. When its constituent parts are held in perfect harmony, something amazing happens. The dogs lose their bark; the eels cease to reel; oil paintings come to life. And then everything resets and goes back to normal and everyone forgets that ever happened. There is a luminous transparence around, though, if you care to look.”