Rabbit, Run makes another must-read list

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Is Rabbit, Run still relevant today? The people at Noombee.com think so. In fact, they included Updike’s 1960 novel on a list of “Five books you should read this year.”

Recommended are Cormac McCarthy’s The Way, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Updike’s first Rabbit Angstrom novel.

“Only three authors have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes and one was John Updike. Rabbit, Run it is the first in a four-book series spanning Updike’s career. In terms of sheer skill, Updike is the ultimate master of the late 20th century. His sentences are amazingly brilliant and his command of the language is next to none.”

Actually, Updike was one of only four writers to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction. The others were Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and, more recently, Colson Whitehead.

But the point is, like the Energizer Bunny, Rabbit keeps running . . . even well into the 21st century.

Updike scholar donates papers to John Updike Childhood Home

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Edward Vargo, who was among the first wave of Updike critics and scholars, has donated his Updike papers to The John Updike Childhood Home. The materials are mostly from his 1973 monograph, Rainstorms and Fire: Ritual in the Novels of John Updike.

Vargo has been living in Thailand, and the donated materials include Updike-related printed matter from that part of the world and accompanying notes, drafts, correspondences, and bibliographies. Later items are also included, such as notes and typescripts from “Whose Africa? Culture Wars in John Updike’s The Coup,” which was presented at the XXI Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1999.

It took the Houghton Library a year to catalog all materials so that they could become available for scholars by appointment, and the board of The John Updike Society, which owns and operates the house-museum at 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington, Pa., predicts that it could take a year or longer before scholars can gain access to the Childhood Home materials. Some of the items that could help researchers include letters, early notes and drafts, cancelled checks, Updike’s travel log, and numerous books that bear his annotations and marginalia.

Updike’s owned books selling now on eBay

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Scholars can study what Ernest Hemingway was reading and what influence it might have had on his fiction because all of his books remain at the Finca Vigia in Cuba, which is now a museum. After Updike died, his extensive book collection was sold to a local book dealer, so it will be a little more difficult for scholars to do their work. But pieces from that collection are appearing now on eBay, sold by Manchester by the Book, the Manchester, Mass. used book store that bought the Updike books in bulk.

The gem of this batch (and yes, The John Updike Childhood Home would love it if someone bought the set and donated it to us) is Updike’s set of Albert Camus Notebooks Vols. 1-2, with one of the volumes heavily annotated in Updike’s handwriting.

Herb Yellin’s Updike collection is now selling online

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Book collector Herb Yellin founded Lord John Press in 1976 in order to publish special limited editions of authors’ works, including a great many by John Updike. Although he died in 2014, Yellin’s extensive collection of Updike books is now being sold online by Between the Covers, a rare book store located in Gloucester City, N.J.

Search “John Updike” on eBay and sort from highest to lowest and the first item to pop up is Yellin’s collection of 438 foreign language signed first editions of John Updike, which is being sold in bulk and carries a whopping price tag of $32,000. The John Updike Childhood Home would love to have these, but it’s a little out of our league. For collectors, Between the Covers has individual Updike items as well, all signed and some very scarce.

Sixties’ reviewer compares Rabbit to Holden Caulfield

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Reading early reviews of now-acclaimed novels is always a fun pastime, and Literary Hub tickled readers with reprinted excerpts from David Boroff’s Nov. 6, 1960 New York Times review of Rabbit, Run, along with a cheerily tawdry cover of a reprint edition of the novel:

“At the beginning of this moving and often brilliant novel, ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom quietly watches a group of boys playing basketball. Then, shedding his coat, he joins them at play, demonstrating superbly the virtuosity that eight years earlier had made him the star of his high school team. This opening defines the mood of nostalgia and unquiet adulthood that characterizes John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

“Rabbit is an older and less articulate Holden Caulfield. An urban cipher, he is trapped by wife, baby, an uncongenial job as demonstrator for a new kitchen utensil.

“‘You get the feeling,’ he says, ‘you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood.’ Like his younger prototype, he is an uneasy picaresque hero who discovers you can run but cannot really flee. And in back of all the restlessness there is an unslaked thirst for spiritual truth.”

“This is the stuff of shabby domestic tragedy—and Mr. Updike spares the reader none of the spiritual poverty of the milieu. The old people are listless and defeated, the young noisily empty. The novel, nevertheless, is a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion; it has none of the glib condescension that spoils so many books of this type. The characters have an imposing complexity.”

“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: a perfectly pitched voice for the subject.

“The treatment of sex commands our attention. For Rabbit, its expression is the final measure of the quality of experience. The author is utterly explicit in his portrayal of Rabbit’s divagations—but the description is as seemly as it is candid, for Mr. Updike is primarily interested in the psychic underside of sexuality. Nevertheless, there are some not easily-ignored footnotes about the erotic sophistication of the post-war generation that will shock the prudish.

“Rabbit, Run is a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst. A modest work, it points to a talent of large dimensions—already proved in the author’s New Yorker stories, and his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair. John Updike, still only 28 years old, is a man to watch.”

NY Times book critics put 2021 in the rear view mirror

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It has come to our attention that an end-of-year article, “Times Critics Discuss 2021 in Books, From Breakout Stars to Cover Blurbs,” managed to invoke John Updike in the process. Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, Jennifer Szalai, and Molly Young were asked questions about the book scene. Here’s one exchange:

“Molly and Alexandra, you both started as book critics for The Times in September. Any all-time favorite books of criticism that you would recommend people delve into over the holidays?

“JACOBS: John Updike’s Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs are the bookends of my Updike Shelf (about which, another time). Here was someone who didn’t have to review or consider his contemporaries or predecessors, and yet industriously, prolifically did. What generosity.

“YOUNG: Martin Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché. His flow is insane.

“JACOBS: Wait, I meant to say that! Well, Amis has written about Updike and Updike about Martin’s father, Kingsley, so maybe this is a male literary turkucken . . . . “

Reader’s Digest picks Updike commentary as a most memorable

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One hundred years ago, in 1922, Reader’s Digest began publishing a general-interest family magazine that balanced original content with reprints of some of the best stories from other publications. Known for a popular feature on readers’ “most memorable characters” in their lives, the magazine put a spin on that and recently published a list of “32 of the Most Memorable Reader’s Digest Stories Ever; A look at the significant, memorable, and prescient articles and authors from 100 years of Reader’s Digest” Updike made the cut.

Reader’s Digest‘s Caroline Fanning writes, “The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner frequently graced our pages. In February 1997, we republished ‘Paranoid Packaging’ from the New Yorker, sharing Updike’s commentary on one of America’s most vexing issues: how increasingly hard it is to open things. ‘All this time, childproof pill bottles had been imperceptibly toughening and complicating, to the point where only children had the patience and eyesight to open them.’”

Happy 100th!

Stutterer’s story invokes Updike’s

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Amy Reardon wrote a personal essay about her stuttering that can help illuminate the world of other stutterers—including one she invokes: John Updike.

In an essay called “Stuck” written for Culture.org’s “The Believer Logger,” Reardon begins by describing a moment of verbal paralysis that strikes her in a business setting at the age of 29.

Reardon continues, “John Updike attributed his stuttering to a ‘deep doubt’ in the ‘dead center of one’s being.’ In his memoir Self-Consciousness, he elaborated, ‘It happens when I feel myself in a false position.’ Updike listed all the situations that made him stutter. When he felt ‘in the wrong.’ When he was with ‘people of evident refinement or distinction.’ In the presence of law enforcement. In the company of men. And last, total heartbreak, what happened to his ability to speak to his children when he divorced their mother and moved away. He’d always been fluent with them before, he wrote, but now, ‘their cheerful unblaming voices over the phone… summoned into my presence now by appointment and invitation, put a stopper in my throat.’”

Reardon talks about two types of stutterers—”baby” stutterers who are repeaters, and those who are “so pained by our struggle that we swallow the repetition and fight silently. When I’m blocked, my lips are sealed, trembling from the pressure inside. This creates long, awkward silences.”

Later, Reardon returns to Updike in describing an interview opportunity with a legendary comedian: “I prepared my questions, pulled my best reporter buddy into the one office at the paper with a phone and dialed. My old enemy loomed. I started bravely because I never know if the words will pass, and often they do. But feeling unworthy in the face of celebrity (remember Updike’s false position) my throat seized wildly. By question three, I could not squeeze out a word. I handed the phone to my friend and pointed to my notebook. She read the questions into the phone, and together we listened, one ear each at the receiver while I took notes. After it was over, we giggled. We both got to interview Bob Hope, and he never noticed. Yay.”

Read the whole essay.

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.”