Category Archives: Updike in Pop Culture

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.

Updike’s early Christmas memory recalled

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Scot Lehigh began his Boston Globe opinion piece on “The bookish delights of Christmas” with a recollection of an exchange he had with John Updike about gifts. He had asked Updike and “other luminaries” to talk about “their favorite Christmas gift ever.”

“The ever-gracious Updike wrote back: ‘What the mind goes to first is a copy of a book by James Thurber called Men, Women and Dogs. This must have been in the early ’40s, so I would have been 11 or 12. It was a book of both cartoons and Thurber prose. I remember the delight with which I opened it. It had a lovely fresh smell of glue and new paper. For me, it was a connection to the wonderful world of New York sophistication.’

“The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner added, ‘The opening of the book on the floor was all mixed up with the smell of the Christmas tree and the quality of December light outside the windows and remains in my mind as an island of Christmas joy.'”

Lehigh called Updike’s response the “most evocative” of all the celebrities he contacted.

Rabbit finds his way into a Sam Riviere poem

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In the U.K., Penguin’s Modern Poets Five: Occasional Wild Parties—featuring poems by Sam Riviere, Frederick Seidel, and Kathryn Maris—includes the poem “Year of the Rabbit,” by Riviere. The poem is also available to view online through Poemhunter.com, and so we include the full text here:

Year of the Rabbit

there is no purer form of advertising
than writing a poem
that’s what the monk told me
if I were a conceptual artist
I would make high-budget trailers
of john updike novels but no actual movie
the scene where angstrom drives towards
the end of his life down a street in the suburbs
lined with a type of tree he’s never bothered
to identify and laden with white blossoms
reflecting slickly in the windscreen
I would fade in the music
as the old song was fading out
keeping the backing vocals at the same distance
kind of balancing the silence
the word RABBIT appears in 10 foot trebuchet

Sam Riviere

 

Updike turns up at an Edible Book Festival

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In case you missed it, this past April Alvernia University held an Edible Book Festival at which John Updike’s Rabbit, Run was represented by (what else?) “a large, chocolate rabbit with a marathon medal around its neck.” Low-hanging fruit?

“Alvernia’s Edible Book Festival offers food for thought,” by Susan Shelly.

Alvernia will host the 6th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, Pa. the first week of October 2020.

 

Updike essay on Gene Kelly included in new dance anthology

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John Updike is no stranger to subscribers of the Library of America series, but this time he’s just one contributor out of many. For Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology, dance critic Mindy Aloff has assembled a collection of essays and other forms written by “dancers and dance creators, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers” to tell the story of dance in America “from tap and swing to ballet and modern dance, from Five Points to Radio City Music Hall, and from the Lindy Hop to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk.”

Among the contributors are Edwin Denby, Joan Acocella, Lincoln Kirstein, Jill Johnston, Clive Barnes, George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Allegra Kent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, Langston Hughes, Susan Sontag, Stuart Hodes, Alastair Macaulay, Zora Neale Hurston, Arlene Croce, Yehuda Hyman, and Updike. Updike’s essay is on “Genial, Kinetic Gene Kelly.”

Here’s the LOA link to purchase

Writer says Rabbit at Rest shows American life has slowed down

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Writing for the Times Union (“Rabbit had quite the run”), Casey Seiler shares with readers his thoughts after reading Rabbit at Rest again. And his first paragraph summation of just a few of the topics Updike covers in the 1990 novel—Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, sexual misconduct, substance abuse, junk food—seem proof enough of the novel’s continued relevancy.

Seiler adds, “For Updike’s Rabbit, 1989 is a year of entropy in which his lifetime of unquenchable appetites presents him with a past-due bill. Reading it today, you get the strange sense that American life has slowed down in its own entropic way. Rabbit’s attitude toward women and racial minorities aren’t uniformly toxic, but they’re in no way woke—put him in a time machine and he’ll feel right at home on the average barstool in 2019. His feckless son grapples with a cocaine problem, but it could just as easily be opioids that help him escape his own early-midlife ennui. The sitcoms and politicians have different titles, but the push and pul among family, career, and the individual remain the same.

“For any reader who was alive and relatively adult [in 1989, the year the novel was set], the book is a remarkable catalog of life month-to-month, including everything from the aftermath of the Pan Am 107 bombing over Lockerbie to the opera buffa fall of televangelist Jim Bakker. As in the previous Rabbit books, Angstrom is a voracious consumer of the news, though his reflections on the meaning of daily events frequently spiral back to his own fascinations: that old standby sex, and the looming specter of his own mortality.

“All four books are written in the present tense, which adds wattage to the tiny electric charge delivered to the contemporary reader every time Updike mentions a cultural figure—like Trump or Oprah—who remain at or near the center of the national stage today. you feel like you’re in a time machine, which is of course what the best literature is.”

“There’s a certain comfort in this, of course: We tend to imagine that the present moment is either the summit or the pits, when in reality we occupy space that was previously occupied by some other striver, and will someday be taken up by another person trying to make it through the day and scrape up some grace. . . . The greatest thing separating Rabbit’s final months from today is the presence of the smartphone, which would no doubt have wrecked many of his most mesmerizing observations of the people and nature around our hero. The book contains some of the greatest descriptions of walks in American literature.”