Category Archives: Updike in Pop Culture

What author cracks up Jerry Seinfeld? Would you believe John Updike?

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An interview with comedian Jerry Seinfeld that originally appeared as a New York Times “By the Book” interview turned up on a number of sites, including a blog by Jack Limpert, editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years. Here are some of the exchanges:

Asked if he reads much fiction, Seinfeld said, “When I used to read more, I really loved John Updike and John Irving. Updike, to me, was insane. I love microscopic acuity and I thought he was untouchable in that: the fineness, and the smallness of things that he would describe so well.

What was the last book that made him laugh?

“I don’t really laugh reading books,” Seinfeld said. “It’s pretty hard to laugh when you’re reading—the written word is tough. I mean, the Updike stuff is funny to me. You know, describing the circles of water under someone’s toes when they get out of the pool. That makes me laugh more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

Which three writers, dead or alive, would he invite to a literary dinner party?

“Well, Updike I mentioned. I think David Halberstam would be a great dinner guest. And I’m into this Marx Brothers thing now, so I would like to sit with this guy [Robert] Bader for dinner. And Lincoln! I consider him to be a great writer.”

What does he plan to read next?

“I’m out of stuff, but along the same lines as John Updike I might give Nicholson Baker a shot.”

Read the whole interview.

New Yorker piece ponders father-son writers

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Tad Friend‘s musings on who gets custody of the family tales in “With father and son writers, who gets to tell the family story?” appeared in the April 18, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.

Friend writes, “When I was young, I admired no writer’s stories more than John Updike’s. Book jackets sporting his woodsy tousle and horndog smile were everywhere, like portraits of a Balkans despot. Updike surrounded us; in some thermostatic way, he established the climate. I was already a watchful white guy, and I already wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, as he had. All I had to do was move to New York, sum up the culture, and reap the hosannas. Easy-peasy.

“When I got to New York, burning with the prescribed low steady fever, I met with a New Yorker writer who’d been hired out of Harvard three years earlier, another Updike in utero. I’d sent him my clips, hoping he’d say, “You should start here tomorrow!” Scratching his ear meditatively, he in fact said, “You know what I’d do if I were you? I’d move to a place like Phoenix and write for an alternative newspaper. Learn how power shapes a midsize American city, and how to report, and all the facets of our craft. And then, after ten years or so, if you still have a mind to, return to New York.”

To make a long story short, “In 1998, a dozen years later than the Updike Protocol had prescribed, I joined the staff of The New Yorker. One of my first stories was about two workmen in Sun Valley who’d dug up a jar of gold coins on land owned by Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone co-founder; each schemed to take the treasure, but Wenner ended up with it. Day wrote, ‘It may be rather nineteenth century of me, but I wondered what The New Yorker’s goal was in publishing it. To show the triumph of a New Yorker who didn’t care?’ After I stopped responding to these irksome questions, he stopped posing them.”

Friend’s latest book is In the Early Times: A Life Reframed.

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.

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.'”

Indie flick includes an Updike novel prop

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Who’s reading (or at least pretending to read) John Updike?

That would be Emma Roberts, Julia Robert’s niece. A sharp-eyed Updike fan spotted her holding a copy of Rabbit, Run in a scene from In a Relationship, a 2018 indie film written, directed, and produced by Sam Boyd. The film tracks two couples in their relationships over the course of one summer and stars Roberts, Michael Angarano, Dree Hemingway, and Patrick Gibson.

The cover of this paperback is unfamiliar. Since book titles aren’t copyrighted but book cover designs do fall under the protection of intellectual property laws, chances are that this cover was a “dummy” created to be used as a prop. And Sam, if we guessed right, maybe you’d like to donate it to The John Updike Childhood Home?

One of the stars is the great granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, so who knows? Maybe a Hemingway fan will spot one of Papa’s novels in another scene. As of this moment, Amazon has the DVD of In a Relationship on sale for $6.74.

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.

Beverly Farms bookshop starts Updike namesake podcast

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Shelf Awareness reports that owners of The Book Shop of Beverly Farms has started a biweekly podcast they’re calling “John Updike’s Ghost,” which “features casual discussions between the store owners–siblings Hannah Harlow and Sam Pfeifle–about what they’re reading, running the store, how they match books with readers and more. Harlow and Pfeifle bought the store two years ago.

“These are the kinds of conversations we have with people who come into the shop all the time,” Pfeifle told Shelf Awareness. “People think you have to read hard books, or that you have to finish everything you start, or that long books are too intimidating. We want them to hear that we read romances and mysteries, too, and that we think some books aren’t working for us at all and just put them down all the time. And reading books should be fun! It shouldn’t feel like work,” Pfeifle said.

The article noted that the podcast is named after Updike because “the store thinks of him as its ‘patron saint.’ The owners explained: “As a long-time resident of Beverly Farms, the Book Shop was his local source for books, and he frequented the spot, which first opened in 1968. As Harlow and Pfeifle learn more about his role in the community, his philosophy on reading and writing, and the way his catalog stands up to contemporary scrutiny, Updike’s presence really seems to resonate through the Shop.”

New Yorker cartoonist blog features Updike’s Thurber

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New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin posted an entry today on Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events titled “Updike’s Thurber.” In it,  readers get a rare glimpse of the cartoon dog that Thurber drew especially for a young ‘tween fan named John Updike (courtesy of Miranda Updike).

“For those of us who treasure Thurber’s art, there is I would suggest, nothing  more wonderful than a Thurber drawn dog. In Updike’s Introduction to Lee Lorenz’s The World of William Steig, he tells us that in 1944, when he was 12 years old, he wrote Thurber a fan letter. Thurber responded with the drawing you see at the top of this post”.

In musing about the relationship between Updike and Thurber, Maslin shared his “favorite Updike description of Thurber’s art: ‘…oddly tender…a personal art that captured in ingenous scrawls a modern man’s bitter experience and nervous excess.'”

Writer’s take on post-Cold War America includes Rabbit wisdom

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In his book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (Metropolitan Books, 2020) and in excerpts and essays from the book that were published in the Sundiata Post and RealClear World, writer Andrew Bacevich assesses American history and the country’s current predicament with a little help from John Updike’s best known alter ego:

“‘Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?’ As the long twilight struggle was finally winding down, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, novelist John Updike’s late-twentieth-century Everyman, pondered that question. In short order, Rabbit got his answer. So too, after only perfunctory consultation, did his fellow citizens.”

Bacevich’s book takes into account the presidencies of Barack Obama, whom Updike voted for, and Donald Trump, whose rise many feel was predicted by Rabbit’s own evolving attitudes. Bacevich is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University and a former career Army officer.