In an obituary for Legacy.com, Linnea Crowther wrote that Spanish novelist Javier Marías, “considered by many to be the greatest living Spanish writer,” died at his home in Madrid of pneumonia on September 11, 2022 at the age of 70.
Like Updike, Marías found literary acclaim early in life. Only 20 when his first novel, Los Dominios del Lobo (Dominions of the Wolf) was published, he wrote 16 more novels and numerous short stories and novellas. “He won the Fray Luis de León Translation Award for his translation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and he also translated works by authors including John Updike and Henry James.” And like Updike, he was widely considered to be a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature . . . an honor that would never come, but should have.
The nearly 500-page novel, which mentions the fatwa against Rushdie, is “far longer than McEwan’s characteristically ‘short, smart and saturnine’ novels, as John Updike summed up in a 2002 review of Atonement,” Allardice wrote. “McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which ‘global events penetrate individual lives,’ of which the fatwa was a perfect example. ‘It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,’ he says.”
“Billed as ‘the story of a lifetime,’ it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. ‘I’ve always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels,’ he explains. ‘I thought, now I’m going to plunder my own life, I’m going to be shameless.'”
“‘I’ve read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards,’ he explains. ‘If you read Doris Lessing’s cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.'”
Asked whether, at age 75, he worries about his legacy, McEwan responded, “I’d like to continue to be read, of course. But again, that’s entirely out of one’s control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But I’ve had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they haven’t reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, ‘Start worrying about your legacy because it’s not looking good from here.'”
Allardice wrote, “He was greatly saddened by what he describes as ‘the assault on Updike’s reputation’; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. ‘Those problematic men who wrote about sex—Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.'”
“We’ve become so tortured about writing about desire. It’s got all so complex,’ he says. ‘But we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether it’s Flaubert you’re reading or even Jane Austen.'”
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, the Dallas Observer‘s Jim Schutze wrote a column titled “Umbrella Man, Umbrella Man, Please Stay Away. Don’t Come to Dealey on JFK Day.” The title itself is pure, poetic, fun with language, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Updike turns up.
“Louie Steven Witt, are you still out there somewhere, alive? Would you tell me if you were? You know you’re back in The Dallas Morning News this morning, but only as a ghost,” Schutze began. Witt was identified as the “umbrella man” during the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. The umbrella man was one of the closest bystanders when the assassin’s bullet struck President Kennedy, and the only one in the area with an umbrella who was opening and closing it. A signal?
“You have something in common with the old rich Dallas people sponsoring the 50th whatever-it-is-this-year. A half century ago all of you were abducted and transported into the bizarre quantum universe of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. When he wrote about you in particular, Mr. Witt, in The New Yorker in 1967, the late great novelist John Updike described the alternative reality that consumed you as ‘a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth.”
The blog Flowers for Socrates said August 20 was World Mosquito Day, and if you missed out on your usual celebration (ahem), here’s an Updike poem on the subject that blogger Nona Blyth Cloud posted that day.
Updike had us at “I was to her a fragrant lake of blood / From which she had to sip a drop or die / A reservoir, a lavish field of food”.
“The Mosquito” was first published in the June 11, 1960 edition of The New Yorker.
In “Rereading: Couples by John Updike review—a melancholy anatomy of adultery,”David Mills began, “John Updike’s 1968 novel Couples has a notorious reputation: it is regarded as a sex book, an explicit manual of swinging high jinks in the ‘post-pill paradise’ of the early 1960s.” He conceded, “There certainly are passages that come across as route-one porn” and provided examples, but took exception with David Foster Wallace’s well-known description of Updike as “just a penis with a thesaurus.”
Within Couples‘ “five-section structure, one unconventionally focuses entirely away from the main character of Dutch builder Piet Hanema, and the prose itself can be tricky, with Piet given stream-of-consciousness interior monologues of almost Joycean complexity.
“Above all, this is a novel about sexual dynamics that in its choreography of shifting relationships becomes a melancholy anatomy of adultery,” Mills wrote, with this qualification: “Of course, it is a white, phallocentric novel with moments of racial stereotyping and casual male violence that make us blench now, but if its social attitudes and assumptions haven’t aged well, then neither have Jane Austen’s.”
Read the full review published in The Sunday Times [UK].
Yes, he was a literary giant, but literary giants have comic moments and can become the butt of jokes just like anyone else. This week two news pieces provided laughs at the late John Updike’s expense.
“I’ve got this letter from John Updike, which is one of my prized possessions,” Willder said. “I’d written a blurb for Couples and I can’t even remember the copy I wrote. I’m sure I would hate it now if I looked at it, but it’s a lovely letter from him. And at the end he just says, and he’s clearly not sure about it, ‘Oh my, have it your way.’ That’s how he signs off the letter!”
Closer to Updike territory, humor columnist Doug Brendel was inspired by the drought-exposed Lake Mead (Calif.) discoveries to speculate on what might be found in Ipswich under similar circumstances. In “Outsidah: If the dam goes, I’ll probably learn too much about Ipswich,” Brendel wrote, “The implications for Ipswich are clear. If the dam comes down, declining riverfront real estate values could be the least of people’s problems.
“In addition to a muddy hellscape of irate turtles and confused fish, decades’ worth of local mysteries will be suddenly and perhaps gruesomely solved.
“Children playing on the newly dried-out riverbank find a soggy box containing copies of John Updike’s novel Couples rounded up and chucked into the river by outraged neighbors in 1968.
“Hikers otherwise minding their own business stumble upon the carcass of that noisy dog that mysteriously disappeared from your neighborhood a couple years ago.
Reading for a hot August? A&E Book Club recommended “two classics and a new bestseller” to read before school starts in order to get you back in an academic frame of mind:
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell—a fictional narrative about Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway and the death of their son, Hamnet. The 2020 novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller. Writer Kennedy Moore noted, “With a simple but pristine writing style, O’Farrell approaches this story through a feminine perspective, focusing on the often overlooked figure of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway—or Agnes, as she is called in the novel. . . . Given the ubiquitous influence of Shakespeare’s plays on modern literature and film, writing anything compelling and original about the playwright or his works is challenging. However, O’Farrell has managed to pull it off in this novel.”
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving—from the author of The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. “Irving uses a surreal writing style to underscore a mystical plot and paint a nostalgic picture of childhood innocence. Beneath this nostalgia, Irving dives deep into politics and religion, two ever-present factors of American life. . . . Irving portrays spiritual characters and miraculous events while maintaining a modern liberal viewpoint.
Rabbit Run, by John Updike. “Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is an average middle-class American from a small city in Pennsylvania. He was a high school basketball star, but after a surprise pregnancy and a shotgun wedding, he finds himself in a dead-end job in the town where he grew up. One day Rabbit gets in the car and decides to leave this world behind, wife and children included.
“John Updike’sRabbit series tracks this fictional character from his early twenties to the end of his life. Updike wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning series over four decades, authoring Rabbit, Run in 1960, Rabbit Redux in 1971, Rabbit is Rich in 1980 and Rabbit at Rest in 1990. The series is especially relevant today as shifting gender roles, the introduction of the birth control pill, abortion and American conceptions of sexual morality lie at the heart of the story. Rabbit, Run is the most gripping of the four novels and will especially resonate with men in their twenties. Not quite a coming-of-age story, this novel is about a man who feels trapped by his impending career, marriage and commitments.
“Reminiscent of Earnest Hemingway, Updike’s writing is not mystical or surreal but offers gritty snapshots of the world as it actually is. The sheer volume of the series adds to the payoff for the reader. By the end of the four novels, the reader knows each character like an old friend and, like the summer, is sad to leave them behind.”
In retrospect, maybe it was a perfect storm of sorts, with Jack De Bellis’s John Updike’s Early Years coming out in 2013, Adam Begley covering some Berks County ground in his biography Updike in 2014, and James Plath collecting and commenting on John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews in 2016. But it took Richard Androne to see the connections and to take a page from Updike’s book reviews and treat them in a single article.
“The Pennsylvania Updike” was published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 85:1 (Winter 2018), though it first came to our attention recently.
“The centrality of Pennsylvania, and especially of his native Berks County, in author John Updike’s life, literary achievement, and ultimate vision comes through vividly in Adam Begley’s biography Updike, Jack Debellis’s more specialized study John Updike’s Early Years, and James Plath’s collection of Updike’s Pennsylvania interviews, many of which were done in Updike’s home county,” Androne wrote.
“Until he was eighteen and left for Harvard, Updike said, ‘there were hardly twenty days that I didn’t spend in Pennsylvania,’ and while after that departure he no longer lived in Berks County for an extended period, he said, ‘though I left Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania has never left me. It figures in much of my work, and not just the earlier.'”
Androne wrote, “just as James Joyce had to leave Ireland to write about it in many of his finest works, Updike had to leave Berks County. Updike told one interviewer, ‘There comes a time when you must test yourself against the world,’ and to another he said, ‘I think I couldn’t have had my writing career if I had stayed in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, I couldn’t have had my writing career if I hadn’t had all that Pennsylvania experience.”
“De Bellis argues even more strongly than Begley for the influence of the physical and cultural Shillington—and especially for that of Updike’s high school classmates—on his work, uncovering numerous parallels between persons and places in life and art. Especially useful in this regard is material in the chapter, ‘Inspirations and Models,'” Androne wrote. Plath, meanwhile, “supplies a perceptive and useful introduction and conclusion in which he synthesizes some of the material in this anthology of interviews. He is particularly good at identifying common denominators in Updike’s comments on Berks County and Pennsylvania in a larger sense.”
Androne wrote that the three Updike books “complement each other and can profitably be read together both by scholars and general readers seriously interested in Updike. Among the many instances of this is Plath’s inclusion of William Ecenbarger’s June 12, 1983 article, ‘Updike Is Home,’ a Shillington interview Begley also uses in his first chapter as illustrative of Updike’s artistic method of turning his own experience into art, in this case a July 4, 1983, New Yorker story called ‘One More Interview’ published less than a month after Ecenbarger’s article, and both the interview and Begley’s treatment of Updike’s story are enhanced by the Shillington detail in De Bellis’s book.”
Civic-minded Berks Countians recently managed to get The John Updike Childhood Home an entry on the popular knowledge database Wikipedia. Now Updike Society members and Updike pilgrims know the exact house location coordinates:
In an August 16, 2022 blog entry, Patrick T. Reardon stepped into his wayback machine and reviewed Updike’s most famous novel from the mindset of a 21st century “essayist, poet, literary critic and an expert on the city of Chicago.” Reardon, who has written about his Catholic faith and was a longtime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, began,
“At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away. Later, he is running to—to the hospital. At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the unknown.”
Reardon broke the novel into three acts, with the first ending when Rabbit hooks up with his old coach Marty Tothero and the prostitute Ruth. The second section “opens two months later and covers Rabbit’s life with Ruth, a life abruptly fractured when Janice goes into labor, Rabbit runs to the hospital in Brewer and moves back in with his family, now with a new daughter Rebecca June. The third section, much shorter, just 37 pages, has to do with tragedy. And it ends with Rabbit wandering away from a cemetery and then, in ‘an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic,’ breaking into a run.'”
“As I was working my way through the first section of Rabbit, Run,” Reardon wrote, “I was puzzled that anyone would want to read so much about a guy who seemed aimless, selfish and irresponsible. By the time I finished the book, I was far beyond such puzzlement. I wanted to know what happened next to Rabbit and immediately ordered a copy of Rabbit Redux.”
“As for Harry Angstrom, I came to find him compelling for the same reasons I initially found him distasteful. Rabbit is an existential Everyman who is searching for a life that’s equivalent to the feel of taking a shot and seeing the basketball go in through the ‘high perfect hole,'” Reardon wrote.
Reardon concluded, “When Rabbit runs, it seems that he is fleeing. But that’s not exactly true. Neither is he running toward something. He is, throughout Rabbit, Run, grasping for, searching for, yearning for a ‘high perfect hole’ of meaning. . . . But it can’t be found. So, like the instinctual young child who is filled with feelings and desires for which there is no language, he leaves behind the mental and the emotional and opts for the physical. He runs.”
