John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was profiled in the series “Persistence of Character — Major interview: Archaeology of a journey” in e-Rea, electronic journal of studies on the English-speaking world. The series, published in French, tracks the breadth of an entire career of distinguished intellectuals, including early influences. An English translation exists in PDF form, but in a file to big to upload and no link to share. Here is the link to a French version online: “Sylvie Mathé: un entre-deux transatlantique (2024).”
The interview begins with a list of career milestones:
1951 : Born in Étampes (91)
1968 : Baccalaureate A (Lycée de Pontoise, Val d’Oise)
1968-69 : American Field Service Scholarship (Rock Island, Illinois)
1969-72 : Higher Literature and Première supérieure (Lycée Fénelon, Paris)
1972-76 : École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (ENS-Sèvres)
1973-74 : Lecturer at Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s)
1975 : Agrégation in English and CAPES in Modern Literature
1975-76, 1977-78 : Visiting Lecturer in French, Yale University
1980 : 3rd cycle thesis : “The everyday and the sacred in the fiction of John Updike” (under the direction of Jacques Cabau, Paris III)
1978-81 : Assistant-Professor in French, Wellesley College
1981-98 : Assistant Professor, then Lecturer, University of Provence
1997 : HDR (under the direction of Claude Fleurdorge, Montpellier III)
1998-2017 : Professor of American Literature, Aix-Marseille University
Mathé talks about the full trajectory of her career, including the experience of spending her senior year in high school in Rock Island, Ill. “Compared to my final year in French, the amount of work was nothing like it was, nor the demands of the homework,” she told the interviewer. She shared that her host family was “extremely puritanical,” with the mother “surprised, even horrified, that I had read texts by Hemingway, or Sanctuary by Faulkner…It must be said that 1968 in a small town in Illinois was still the 50s. It had nothing to do with what was happening on campuses at the same time, with women’s lib, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, etc.” In summary, “Let’s say that compared to my final year in French, or my life in France, which was essentially focused on high school, work and success, it was a much more varied life, more entertaining…I was doing things I had never done before: I was caught up in the rhythm, I went to matches according to the football, basketball, baseball seasons,” and she dated, went to parties where there was drinking and marijuana brownies, and was generally inducted into American culture.
Mathé’s introduction to John Updike came when she went to Oxford and studied “Puritanism in John Updike’s Fiction” with Jeanne-Marie Santraud, “who was the only Americanist at Paris IV.” She would go on to write her master’s thesis on Updike and compose a monograph for the American Voices series edited by Marc Chénetier titled John Updike: Nostalgia for America.
Updike “knew French,” Mathé says. “He came to France for a few months with his family. In several of his novels, for example in Couples, we find a character who prides himself on speaking French. Generally, it’s very funny because he misses the mark.”
On the American Literature public Facebook group, Milan Milan Stankovic posted a consideration/comparison of two “Great American Writers” whose works offer “profound insights into American society, culture, and individual psychological and individual psychological complexities”: John Updike and Philip Roth.
Edwin Woodruff, who was given a copy of Gertrude and Claudius by a cast member when he directed the play for community theater, wrote in a Patheos column that while he found Updike’s sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet “a bit offputting” in the beginning, with a style that “seemed stilted and awkward and the analysis of everyone’s motivations and thoughts rather labored and obvious. But it grew on me as it went on.
Volume 10, Number 2 (Spring 2024) of The John Updike Review was recently published, and Updike society members have been quick to comment on the stunning cover: a photograph of the Tucson casitas that John and Martha Updike owned and lived in each spring between 2004-2008. The photo was taken by the journal’s editor, James Schiff, when attendees at the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson had the opportunity to tour the casitas.
Dr. Carla Alexandra Ferreira, a Brazilian scholar whose YouTube channel is “Carla Ferreira: Literary Dialogues,” has featured brief discussions of two John Updike novels: 
This National Windows Day (that’s a thing?), renowned photographer Jill Krementz shared some of the photos she took of 
Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Technological University Dublin, Ireland, has accepted an invitation to join The John Updike Society Board of Directors. Her appointment is effective immediately.
“We float above events, seeing them from the perspective of different characters, sometimes switching viewpoint over the space of a paragraph,” Jones wrote. “Rabbit, Run expresses a desire to transcend ordinary life, while also suggesting—in the manner of Ecclesiastes—that the only meaningful escape available to us lies in ordinary things. In the end, Rabbit, Run does not promise any kind of silly nirvana, but it does suggest a more liberating and interesting way of looking at the non-nirvana in which we spend our days.”
On May 3, 2024, the “Novelist Spotlight: Interviews and insights with published fiction writers” blog looked in the rear-view mirror to discuss a writer who, according to host and novelist Mike Consol, wrote more beautifully in English than anyone else.