Writing on “Cruel Intentions” for TLS (Times Literary Supplement), Will Rees discusses the life of Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard at some length and draws upon Updike at one point:

“John Updike famously argued that Kierkegaard’s works owe much to the art of novel-writing. After all, they are written by and about fictional characters whose world views they attempt to occupy from within. In a way that would please the contemporary teacher of creative writing, Kierkegaard does not tell – he shows. But we mustn’t get carried away; we do Kierkegaard a disservice if we simply appreciate his books. By departing from the normal philosophical form, they arguably tighten rather than slacken the demand on our attention, because arguments are present, but one must search for them, and often they reside in what Kierkegaard’s characters do not or cannot say – in the implicit gaps in their imperfect world views.”

James Howden, Sports, Culture & Other Obsessions posted an entry this past week on “John Updike: On Race and Being American” that quotes large sections from an essay in Self-Consciousness and reacts to Updike’s remarks about race in America.

One line that particularly stands out in a letter to his half-Ghanian grandchildren: “When Anoff was born . . . my instinctive thought was that he would do better if his parents settled in Ghana; that is, I trusted an African country to treat a half-white person better than my own country would treat a half-black. Now I wonder. Ours is a changing, merging, exogamous world, and while racial prejudice operates in the United States against blacks in many ways overt and oblique . . . at least our laws now formally insist upon equal rights. . . .”

“An ideal colorblind society flickers at the forward edge of a sluggishly evolving one . . . America is slowly becoming yours, I want to think,” Updike wrote many years before the current state of racism in America, fueled by politics.

Adrienne LaFrance contemplates “The Human Fear of Total Knowledge; Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy” and quotes John Updike in the process.

“Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture,” she writes in her June 3, 2016 Atlantic article. “People adore them. (Perhaps even more than that, people love the idea of them….)”

“In The Book of Sand, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of an unexpected visit from a Bible salesman, who has in his collection a most unusual object. ‘It can’t be, but it is,’ the salesman says. ‘The number of pages is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none is the last.’ The strange book is so engrossing as to be sinister,” LaFrance writes, adding that in Borges’ The Library of Babel “‘each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.’ The appearance of order is an illusion….”

“I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum,’ John Updike wrote in an essay about Borges in 1965. ‘Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life.’

“Borges was not just interested in literary artifice, as Updike points out, but fundamentally concerned with the nature of reality, a preoccupation that often led him to interrogate the scope and organization of human knowledge.”

The Buffalo News “Reporters’ Notebook” for March 17, 2016, posted by Olaf Fub,  quoted John Updike:

“A thought for this drizzly week from novelist John Updike, born on this date in 1932, ‘Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.'”

Updike bibliographer sent an email saying the quote, which is from “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” should read, “Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth”; but we expect to hear shortly from Updike’s biographer as well, since Updike was not born on March 17, but rather on the 18th.”

Writing for The Telegraph, Martin Chilton considers the legacy of John Cheever and cites Updike in the process:

“As his contemporary John Updike put it: ‘John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.”

“John Cheever: ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’

The article was posted on October 15, 2015.

Anne Tyler, whose novel A Spool of Blue Thread made the Man Booker 2015 shortlist, referred to Updike in remarks that appeared in The Guardian. She says that “with each new scene I have an uncomfortable sense of making it up, of ordering them about willy-nilly. Oh, what a silly, artificial business novel-writing is, I’ll think. Who am I kidding, here? And I glance at the John Updike poem that I keep above my desk, ‘Marching Through a Novel’ where he likens his characters to meek foot soldiers blindly following his orders. Poor dears. I pity them.

“But gradually, new layers develop. I did plan for Denny to marry but I didn’t know exactly whom he married, and once I see her, I smile. I’m intrigued by Stem’s wife Nora: she’s as mysterious to me as she is to the rest of the family, and I perk up whenever she enters a scene.

“Then I find out that the mother of the family used to have one of those bad-boy boyfriends when she was in her teens. Why, I had no idea! I have to go back to an earlier section to drop in a couple of references to him. (Or, as John Updike put it, to ‘develop a motive backwards to suit the deed that’s done.’) This is why I love rewriting: each new draft reflects more of those extra layers that I hadn’t foreseen at the start.

“Man Booker 2015 shortlist: the stories behind the novels”