Category Archives: Updike Quoted

Was Updike partly responsible for Tim O’Brien’s literary ascent?

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LitHub recently published a fascinating piece by Alex Vernon, “Bringing the War Home: How Tim O’Brien Approached the Art of Moral Consequence” (May 27, 2025), in which John Updike featured prominently.

The issue was negative versus positive reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New York Times review was cited as an example of the former, with Lehmann-Haupt arguing that “by repeatedly invoking Catch-22 Mr. O’Brien reminds us that Mr. Heller caught the madness of war better, if only because the logic of Catch-22 is consistently surrealistic and doesn’t try to mix in fantasies that depend on their believability to sustain. I can even imagine it being said that Going After Cacciato is the Catch-22 of Vietnam. The trouble is, Catch-22 is the Catch-22 of Vietnam.”

Vernon wrote, “Not to worry, as The New York Times Book Review lauded the novel on its front page and didn’t cite Heller. It did bring in Hemingway, as did John Updike’s review in The New Yorker, which struck the opposite note as Lehmann-Haupt’s: ‘As a fictional portrait of this war, Going After Cac­ciato is hard to fault, and will be hard to better.’

“Cacciato enjoyed plenty of glowing reviews, yet Updike’s review had a huge impact on its success and helped convince the reading world to pay attention to the literature of O’Brien’s war. As O’Brien’s agent’s office wrote to Lawrence, “The John Updike review in The New Yorker seemed to be the word that tipped the scales against resistance to a Viet Nam novel, and now all the scouts are asking for it.”

Read the entire article

Updike and Wallace seem forever linked in writing debates

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In a June 9, 2025 piece published by The New Statesman, George Monaghan considered “The revenge of the young male novelist; Can good writing solve our crisis of masculinity?” 

Of course, John Updike came up, and so did a writer once influenced by him who later seemed to make a bigger name for himself by attacking him:  David Foster Wallace. The context: ego as it relates to writers.

“American novelist John Updike claimed not to write for ego: ‘I think of it more as innocence. A writer must be in some way innocent.’ We might raise an eyebrow at this, from the highly successful and famously intrusive chronicler of human closeness. Even David Foster Wallace, the totem effigy of literary chauvinism, denounced Updike as a ‘phallocrat.’ But if we doubt such innocence of Updike, pronouncing as he was at the flushest height of fiction’s postwar heyday, we might believe it of these new novelists, writing as they are and when they are. Without a promise of glory, and facing general skepticism, they have written from pure motives. They are novelists as Updike defined them: ‘only a reader who was so excited that he tried to imitate and give back the bliss that he enjoyed’.

“So it may be no bad thing if none of these novels quite fetches the reviews Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest did (‘the plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. … it’s as though Wittgenstein has gone on Jeopardy!’). These guys want to start a moment, not end one. They more want to write novels than be novelists. It is hard to say what relief these books might bring to a societal masculinity crisis, but in composing them their authors have displayed at least the two simple virtues Updike wanted to claim for himself: ‘a love of what is, and a wish to make a thing.'”

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About John John Updike’s Writing Routine

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There’s a website for everything these days, including one on Famous Writing Routines. What works for one writer might not work for another, but when that one writer is John Updike, who wrote more than 60 books during his professional lifetime, there has to be something, even in a single tip—which is what these posts seem to entail—to help writers aspiring to complete ONE book. Hao Nguyen shared this writing advice from Updike:

“Even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.”

‘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.”

‘Perfection Wasted’: John Updike’s poetic self-assessment

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On the Best American Poetry blog, the April 10, 2025 entry was John Updike’s “Perfection Wasted,” a poem written when the author was dying of lung cancer.

Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

(included in Endpoint and Other Poems)

Christopher Lydon considers John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’

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Boston radio’s Christopher Lydon has interviewed Updike on numerous occasions, and now he’s turned his admiration for Updike into “Open Source” conversations. In “John Updike and his Terrorist,” Lydon shares an interview he did with Updike about the post-9/11 novel and adds his own comments:

“Terrorist is cinematic and political—wonderfully so, as I read it. It may be as close to the movie Syriana as we’ll ever get from Updike.

“It’s not for me to vouch that he nailed every answer here. But I can report the huge pleasure for one reader—picking up a piece of our conversation recently on The Great American Novel—in ‘public’ fiction, masterfully made, encompassing the depressive high-school guidance counsellor Jack Levy, and the hateful Secretary of Homeland Security, whose name sounds like Haffenreffer; and at the center of it all, Ahmad Ashmawy Mullow at the brink of manhood, flickering between earnestness and extremism, trying to solidify a Muslim consciousness in what feels like a wasteland of selfishness and materialism.'”

On January 28, 2009, one day after Updike died, Lydon had paid tribute to the legendary writer who chose the Boston area for his home for his adult life, in “John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose”: “John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books—novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and In the Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories like ‘Pigeon Feathers’ about a boy’s crisis of faith, which ends in his famous meditation on the pigeons he’s shot, on orders, in his mother’s barn, and the irresistible beauty of the blue and gray patterns in their dull coloring.”

Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection

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British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations. In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It’s a delicious counterpoint to Evans’s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples with influencing Ordinary People, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other’s fingertips?'”

New Yorker at 100 also celebrates editorial battles

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The New Yorker is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those New Yorker pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that Made The New Yorker.” John Updike Society’s Dave Lull culled the sections that deal with Updike:

1—”Early in Adam Gopnik’s stint as a New Yorker editor, he got a draft of a piece from John Updike. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:
Dear Adam,
The piece recently submitted was
a) deemed unacceptable,
b) in need of significant rewriting,
c) lost behind a radiator.
John
Updike—even Updike!—had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. ‘Was anything wrong with the Auden review?’ Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. ‘There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.’ He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. ‘I enclose a disk,’ Updike once wrote to Finder, ‘but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.’”
2—”White later wrote to Updike, ‘Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: ‘There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.’”
3—”There’s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers—sometimes for years—leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits.”
4—”In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: ‘Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.’”
5—”Updike never saw that pasture. ‘I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,’ he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. ‘They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.’ He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.”

The Biblio File retro-reminds of Updike ‘Just Looking’

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Nigel Beale, of The Biblio File podcast, posted an entry a while back reminding followers that “Updike the essayist is always worth reading.” It’s the Jan. 1990 issue of Art & Antiques, in which an interview showcases Updike’s response to a photo from Life magazine of a young woman dancing to celebrate Hawaii’s statehood.

Asked what struck him about the photo enough to write about it, Updike responded, “The word Wahine, for one thing—proving that captions matter. “The young woman’s beauty, for another—her svelte midriff, her exposed navel, her perfect teeth, her cluster of earrings, her fishnet stockings with their hint of whorishness. The expression on her face, between glee and agony. The sea of faces behind her. Her curious aloneness in front of that sea, facing the other way, on what appears to be an otherwise deserted stage. Is she one of a chorus line? Whence comes the music she is swaying to, the rhythmic impetus hoisting one dainty heel up from its slipper and swirling the threads of her skirt and her bra? What force has all but shut her eyes? The camera has caught a Dionysian mystery; it has caught ecstasy.”

Updike’s full rumination on this particular artwork and others can be found in Just Looking, the first of three volumes of his art criticism.