Category Archives: Updike Quoted

Updike’s American Everyman is referenced in a July 4 think piece

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It’s July 4 in the U.S., and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is once again in the news—or rather, a think piece. Warning: Though Harry leaned right, The Nation, in which this piece by Jeet Heer appears, leans left. One statistic, though, seems more personal than political, because the comparison year (2004) is one during which another Republican president, George W. Bush, was in office:

Currently, “Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.”

Heer had written, “Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

“Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: ‘Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he had been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Read the whole article. 

Killing time by chasing Updike

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Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the shelf. As it turns out, his diversion is the literary scholar’s method:

“Gearing up for the book of John Updike letters coming out in October I thought I’d once again travel through Adam Begley’s terrif Updike. Curiosity took me on a hunt when I came across this sentence on page 426:

“’A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his “heart and soul” into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been “recognized”.’

“It was the ‘…small public library in the Hudson Valley…’ that sent me scampering to Google. As I live in the Hudson Valley and am acquainted with a number of its libraries, I figured I’d be able to (hopefully!) quickly zero in on which library Updike visited. Researching the Peter Arno biography i wrote, I quickly learned things just don’t go as smoothly as you might think when on a fact-finding mission.

“The ‘Notes’ in Begley’s Updike biography indicate the ‘…small public library…’ passage was sourced from Updike’s Odd Jobs, page 761. I headed right to Odd Jobs, page 761, but the passage wasn’t there. Dead end. It happens (my biography of Peter Arno has its share of ‘issues.’). I briefly considered writing Mr. Begley, but decided that this was too small a ‘thing’ for him to be troubled with. A day or two went by. I tried to let the hunt go. Then, this afternoon, having worked on cartoons for hours, and in need of a break, I sat next to the Updike section of our bookshelves and thought for a moment. What if the page number 761 was correct, but the book title was off. I began looking through Updike’s various hefty collections, beginning with Higher Gossip: zip. Due Considerations: zip. More Matter…bingo! There, on page 761 is this from Updike’s ‘Me and My Books’ — it was originally published in The New Yorker, February 3, 1997:

“‘On one steel shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its own tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge near the library door…’

“I began thinking about the Hudson Valley libraries I was familiar with. None of them fit Updike’s description. So back to Google and to the list of libraries lining the Hudson Valley. Using Google maps (aerial view) I was able to easily see if any library was that close to water. I struck out with perhaps twenty or so libraries, when I saw this location in Marlboro, New York. And then using the street view, there it was, exactly as Updike described it: ‘tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge.’ This scene is directly across from the Gomez Mill House.

Updike Childhood Home adds two paintings from the fiction

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John Updike’s children recently donated more one-of-a-kind objects to The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, among them two still life paintings that their father and mother had painted side-by-side while Updike was a student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, England. Michael Updike said that as a trailing spouse who majored in art as an undergrad, his mother talked her way into sitting in and participating in John’s classes. Mary sat to his father’s right, Michael pointed out, given the placement of objects on each canvas. The paintings are referenced in Updike’s short story “Still Life” (from Pigeon Feathers, reprinted in The Early Stories):

“At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really, was ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.

“Don’t be funny, Leonard,” Robin said. “All those horrid little wrinkles, we’d be at it forever.”

“Well, what else could you grind?”

“We’re not going to grind anything; we’re going to paint it. What we want is something smoothe.”

“Oranges, miss?” the lad in charge offered.

“Oh, oranges. Everyone’s doing oranges—looks like a pack of advertisements for vitamin C. What we want…” Frowning, she surveyed the produce, and Leonard’s heart, plunged in the novel intimacy of shopping with a woman, beat excitedly. “Onions,” Robin declared. “Onions are what we want.”

John gave his still life to his mother, who displayed it at the Plowville house, while Mary kept hers. Now the paintings are together again, above the bed that John painted with his mother—John’s on the left, Mary’s on the right . . . just as in Oxford.

Visit and look at the paintings up close and vote: Who did it best? John (left) or Mary (right)?

The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington, Pa., is owned and operated by the 501c3 John Updike Society. It is open most Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. For questions about visiting the museum, contact director Maria Lester, johnupdikeeducation@gmail.com.

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.'”

Read the entire article

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?'”