An Alberta professor on Circling Around and With Rabbit, Run

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We have stumbled across a new critical essay (emphasis on the critical)—“Nights of the Lepus: Circling around and with Rabbit, Run by John Updike”—by Alberta University of the Arts professor Christopher Willard. It begins,

“In an early review of Rabbit, Run David Boroff of The New York Times  wrote, “The author’s style is particularly impressive; artful and supple, its brilliance is belied by its relaxed rhythms. Mr. Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase catches the light. The prose is that rarest of achievements—perfectly pitched voice for the subject” (Boroff, 1960). But Updike’s noticing and skewing of details is by far less than the  whole of his novel, although this   is the aspect upon which many critics dwell. Updike can recognizably follow Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant” but just as frequently his relaxed rhythms and details are neither here—furthering the story along with necessary thoughts by Rabbit, nor there—lapsing into a full stream of consciousness carried by linguistic brilliance as found for example in Durrell’s  Alexandria Quartet.

“The tension inherent in allowing passages to hover in a middle space without commitment to one or the other intent is at times frustrating but that said, Updike deserves praise for a masterwork in free indirect discourse of which in my view we can never have enough examples. Then again, flip side, at his blandest, Updike comes off like the Alex Katz of writing, the darling of those who prefer style like warm Cheez Whiz so it oozes down their throats without too much conscious swallowing.”

Clearly not a fan, Willard, who was born in Maine and has written several works of fiction himself, concludes,

“Elevating the mundane is an art, Robbe-Grillet comes to mind or Céline, and then a whole host of stream of consciousness novels flow into this river. Updike never went to these places in  Rabbit, Run. When his writing tends toward a stream of consciousness, he engages the damper.  When the writing starts getting too internal he brings it back to the detail. He never wants, it seems, to let the writing take him where it might or must take him, instead he continually forces it back to the method, and it’s a strong method, although his reliance on it could earn him the nickname ‘The Stephen King of a Great Literary Modernism.’ I think too of the band Boston,  with a groundbreaking first album and a remainder of an oeuvre comprised of pastiche, or of Jackson Pollock who ended up doing parodies of Pollocks where the flame of unadulterated engagement between one’s soul and the world seems cast off for method and form.”

A few examples to back up the claims would have been nice.

Ten years ago: Guardian names 10 best museum writing

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Here’s an interesting anniversary. Ten years (plus three days) later, this reader’s list surfaced in an Updike search: “John Mullan’s 10 of the best: museums.”

John Keats is here: “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time” at the British Museum.

So is Henry James’ short story “Julia Bride,” which opens on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum.

Thomas Hardy’s poem “In the British Museum” also makes the cut, as does J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caufield visits the Natural History Museum in New York City). P.D. James’ The Murder Room (set in a small, family-owned museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath), Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife (with its visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford), Anthony Horowitz’s Scorpia Rising (again at the British Museum), A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (which opens at the South Kensington Museum), China Miéville’s Kraken (and the squid at the British Museum of Natural History), AND . . .

John Updike’s “Museums and Women,” the title story from Museums and Women and Other Stories (1972): “Updike’s story features a man who has always associated museum visits with his attachment to women – from his mother, to the girl with whom he shared school trips, to his wife, whom he met in a university museum. When he has an affair, it is with a woman who works in a museum, and they visit the Frick and the Guggenheim together.”

What author cracks up Jerry Seinfeld? Would you believe John Updike?

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An interview with comedian Jerry Seinfeld that originally appeared as a New York Times “By the Book” interview turned up on a number of sites, including a blog by Jack Limpert, editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years. Here are some of the exchanges:

Asked if he reads much fiction, Seinfeld said, “When I used to read more, I really loved John Updike and John Irving. Updike, to me, was insane. I love microscopic acuity and I thought he was untouchable in that: the fineness, and the smallness of things that he would describe so well.

What was the last book that made him laugh?

“I don’t really laugh reading books,” Seinfeld said. “It’s pretty hard to laugh when you’re reading—the written word is tough. I mean, the Updike stuff is funny to me. You know, describing the circles of water under someone’s toes when they get out of the pool. That makes me laugh more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

Which three writers, dead or alive, would he invite to a literary dinner party?

“Well, Updike I mentioned. I think David Halberstam would be a great dinner guest. And I’m into this Marx Brothers thing now, so I would like to sit with this guy [Robert] Bader for dinner. And Lincoln! I consider him to be a great writer.”

What does he plan to read next?

“I’m out of stuff, but along the same lines as John Updike I might give Nicholson Baker a shot.”

Read the whole interview.

Happy Magazine includes Updike on its list of best erotic novels

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Some of the titles on this list by Ria Pandey are actually short story collections, but no matter: here are 34 of the most titillating erotic works of fiction, according to the author. Updike’s Couples made the cut, but many Updike fans might be thinking Rabbit Is Rich worthy of the list as well.

Some of Updike’s plain-brown-wrapper company:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D.H. Lawrence
The Tropic of Cancer—Henry Miller
Story of O—Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage
Emmanuelle—Emmanuelle Arsan
Portnoy’s Complaint—Philip Roth
Delta of Venus—Anaïs Nin
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty—Anne Rice
Lust and Other Stories—Susan Minot
Vox—Nicholson Baker
The Thorn Birds—Colleen McCullough
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.—Catherine Millet

Of Couples, Pandey writes, “Couples details the lives of ten married couples living in a New England community who create a sex cult. While it sounds simple on the surface level, Couples embarks on an intense emotional and psychological meditation on the nature of love, sex, and commitment. A review by Time describes the events of the novel as such: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”

Plowville spotlighted in Reading Eagle history feature

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“Plowville” to an Updike fan calls to mind the image of 13-year-old John in the back of the family Buick looking out of the rear window at his beloved dogwood tree and house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue receding into the distance, both spatially and temporally.

Plowville is big part of the Updike story, and readers might want to check out the historical feature on Plowville that Susan Miers Smith wrote for the Reading Eagle in January 2022: “Berks Place: Plowville a slice of Americana in Robeson Township; The village grew up around a well-known hotel on Route 10.”

Smith writes, “The cemetery is also the final resting spot of Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and Wesley Russell Updike, the parents of author John Updike. Linda Updike was born in and died in a Plowville farmhouse nearby.” That farmhouse was prominently featured in Updike’s early novel Of the Farm, in which a writer returns to visit his parents and introduce to them his second wife—with tensions between wife and mother creating much of the drama.

When it comes to fatherhood, writer says Rabbit is no model

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With another Father’s Day in the rear-view mirror, if anyone contemplated what makes a good dad, chances are Harry Angstrom didn’t come up in conversation as an exemplar. He certainly didn’t in Oliver Munday’s personal essay on “The Book That Captures My Life as a Dad,” which appeared in The Atlantic, June 17, 2022. That honor was reserved for Abbott, the professor-dad hero of Chris Bachelder’s novel Abbott Awaits. Abbott, the father of a two year old, husband of a pregnant insomniac, and “confused owner of a terrified dog,” doesn’t run. He somehow “endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.”

Munday writes, “Many dad books are presented as guides, memoirs, or clever manuals; and though most have useful advice, they rarely succeed in rising above their function. Early fatherhood, when portrayed in literature, is often similarly practical: serving to color the characters, plot, and themes, but rarely warranting a sustained look. Take John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which charts the struggle of a restless young father who abandons his family. By the time Rabbit returns home, later in the novel, the chances of him proving himself as a father are tragically lost. All of which is to say: Fathering, as depicted in these books, is usually not artful, subtle, or consoling. Abbott Awaits is the antidote.”

Yes, but how’s his golf game?

Retiring book critic names his Top 20 memorable books

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When you’ve been a book critic as long as Craig Brown has, you deserve one of the longest headlines in recent memory: “Why, after 23 years and 1.5 million words as Mail on Sunday’s book critic, I think Jade Goody is up there with Dickens’: After writing the equivalent of War and Peace (twice), CRAIG BROWN hangs up his pen – and remembers 20 titles he most enjoyed reading.”

Click on the link above to read his farewell remarks.

As for the “20 Most Memorable Books I’ve Reviewed,” here they are:

Waterlog—Roger Deakin
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher—Kate Summerscale
Birds and People—Mark Cocker
Once Upon a Secret—Mimi Alford
Madeleine—Kate McCann
A Very English Scandal—John Preston
This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood—Alan Johnson
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power—Robert A. Caro
Out of Sheer Rage—Geoff Dyer
Untold Stories—Alan Bennett
Simon Gray’s Diaries—Simon Gray
Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979—Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Tamara Drewe—Posy Simmonds
The Man Who Went into the West—Byron Rogers
The Examined Life—Stephen Grosz
The Year of Magical Thinking—Joan Didion
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film—David Thomson
Anne Tyler’s Novels—yes, any of them
Tales of a New Jerusalem—David Kynaston
Endpoint and Other Poems—John Updike

“Updike died in 2009, having written more than 50 books, all of them, as Tobias Wolff once observed, ‘suffused with the pleasure of simply being alive’. Ths posthumously published book of poems, written when the end was in sight, is full of wonder and delight.”


Tonight only: Updike’s Witches take the London stage

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Playbill‘s Leah Putnam reports that for one night only, June 20, 2022, The Witches of Eastwick Concert will play London’s Sondheim Theatre, with original cast member Maria Friedman directing the performance.

The cast consists of Natasha J Barnes as Alexandra, John Partridge as Darryl Van Horne, Carrie Hope Fletcher as Sukie, and Laura Pitt-Pulford as Jane.

“Featuring a book by and lyrics by John Dempsey (The Fix), with music by Dana P. Rowe (The Fix), the show is based on the John Updike novel and film adaptation of the same name. Musical staging is by Chrissie Cartwright, with associate direction by Jack McCann, and associate musical direction by Mike Steel. Also serving on the creative team are Isaac McCullough as musical director, Jonathan Lipman as costume designer, Simon Sherriff as lighting designer, Adam Fisher as sound designer. Jack Maple serves as producer of the concert, which is presented by arrangement with Cameron Mackintosh Ltd.

“Friedman said in a statement, ‘I’m so incredibly excited to be revisiting Eastwick after all these years. To be reunited with the fantastic Stephen Mear, and to have the opportunity to bring this beloved musical back to London, and at the simply stunning Sondheim Theatre, for one-night-only is an absolute thrill, and I can’t wait to get started.” Friedman is set to reprise her direction of Merrily We Roll Along when the British production transfers to Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop later this year.

“The Witches of Eastwick‘s last major production on the London stage was its original run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 2000, from which it transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre the following year.”

Read the whole article.

UnHerd writer worries about the future of literature

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Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Mary Gaitskill penned a meditation on writing and reading titled “Will literature survive?” for the website UnHerd. “We have fallen out of love with good writing,” the subhead laments.

Gaitskill writes, “An element of style that I especially care about is description of the world that the writer creates on the page” . . . a dead giveaway that a reference to John Updike will be forthcoming, and it was:

“More recently, in 2019, Joyce Carol Oates came to Claremont McKenna where I was teaching and did an intimate Q&A. I brought up the writer John Updike; I was teaching a novel by him which was hard for students to read partly because he was sexist and backward in his racial attitudes, but even more because he described his worlds very, very densely. He would spend pages describing what a character sees driving down a country road at night. Students had a hard time even tracking it — they could, but they had to try. (Note: at least one of them, once he got the hang of it, loved it, which was great.)

“I wanted to hear what Oates had to say about it because she’s of an older generation; she and Updike were peers. What she said was (paraphrasing again): yes, John could describe anything and everything but no one wants to read that any more, because (directly quoting) “people have moved on”/  I was really surprised by this. “Moved on”? We’ve moved on from the world we live in? How is that possible?” asks Gaitskill, whose novel, Veronica, was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.

How is it possible? Attention span? The need for instant gratification provided by 40-second TikTok videos? Whatever the root cause(s), true readers are apt to share Gaitskill’s dismay.

A writer’s meditation on Updike’s meditation on the Resurrection

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Chris Simmons penned a short “Meditation” for the Hickory Daily Record that considers Updike’s thoughts about the Resurrection:

Risen Christ. 1510. Andrea Previtali.
Rhode Island School of Design Museum

“At 28, the novelist John Updike cut to the bottom line of the Resurrection. Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of it surely led him to write ‘Make no mistake, if he rose at all, it was as his body; If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.’

“Updike realized that the Resurrection’s scandal, that a human could rise from the dead, must be true or the faith should be abandoned. He would have none of making it metaphor or redefining it to become less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had defeated it himself. At 76, as he approached its threshold, Updike asked his wife, “Are you ready for the leap?”

“It’s easy for the reality of the scandal to lose its punch in our gospel-saturated, yet post-Christian culture, especially in western North Carolina where many of us watched Billy Graham relentlessly invoke the Crucifixion during crusades from just about everywhere. We should sternly resist our own casualness with it in an age when many wrongly treat it as folklore. The Crucifixion was exactly the opposite. The Romans opposed Christianity so strongly partly because early Christians, much like Updike, were so focused on reality itself.”