Writer Anne Bernays recalls Updike in an interview

Posted on by
Reply

On July 14, 2025, Virginia Pye posted an interview she did with writer Anne Bernays for Cambridge Day: “We had fun.” Bernays is a longtime resident of the Boston area and the author of 10 novels, two books of nonfiction with her husband Justin Kaplan, and a book on the craft of writing with fellow Cambridge author Pamela Painter.

When Pye asked Bernays, “But you say Cambridge as a literary center hasn’t really fed you or your work over the years?” Bernays responded,

“I’m very gregarious, as you can tell, and I enjoy meeting people. I love talking to people and when there was no community, I and two other people, we decided to form one here. And soon after that one of them moved away and the other person lost interest, so I was left with founding Pen New England, which I ran for 10 years. I was the head of the board and I had some of my friends on it. Nobody wanted to do it. That’s often how it is, but people came to the panels we put on.

“My favorite one was called, ‘Rejection.’ John Updike, who was a friend, I got him to come on. And all these people were there, including Leslie Epstein, talking about rejection. When John Updike talked about rejection there was this gasp from the audience. It was the best thing that could have happened because people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘John Updike was rejected?’ It made the process less awesome, less scary. We had fun.”

Read the whole interview.

Updike is referenced in a book of Mark Twain poems

Posted on by
Reply

John Updike Society president James Plath spent two weeks as a fall 2023 Quarry Farm Fellow working on an essay detailing how Twain modeled being a celebrity writer for both Hemingway and Updike. Plath conducted that research, but also felt compelled to write poems about the house and its inhabitants. Not surprisingly, Updike found his way into one of the poems:

Carved Stone Troughs

John Updike saw himself in a dogwood tree
his parents planted the year he turned one.
Parents do such things. Twain’s jeu d’esprit
led him to place four troughs in part-sun

along the Farm on East Hill road, so spaced
to revive tired horses, and with their carvings mark
the birth of four Clemens—who may have raced
later to see whose was used, while dogs would bark.

But when three of four children die before the father,
those troughs become hollowed-out markers that bear
the burden of emptiness, not crosses to inspire prayer
or reflection. It’s a wonder that Twain continued to care,

funneling stone-cold grief into sage
satire, instead of yielding to alcohol and rage.

At Quarry Farm was published in June 2025 by Kelsay Books and is available from the publisher and Amazon. Society members wanting a copy and who also plan on attending the Roth-Updike Conference in NYC in October can email Plath (jplath@iwu.edu) to bring a copy there to save postage.

Psychology professor offers unique take on Vidal, Updike, and masculinity

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes the most interesting takes on an author come from great thinkers outside the field of literature. Such is the case with an article by Kali DuBois that was published in Medium: “What If Gore Vidal and John Updike Had a Lovechild? Why Chop Dog-Eared These Pages Like a Hungry Man on a Cheeseburger Vagina.” 

“Gore Vidal and John Updike reshaped what it meant to be a man in America—and they did it from opposite ends of the battlefield,” wrote DuBois, who holds a Master’s degree in human sexuality and certifications in biological psychology, biofeedback, kinesiology, neuro-semantics, tantra, yoga, mind codes, and martial arts.

“Gore Vidal taught men that the personal was political, and that sex was never just about pleasure but about power. He forced men to see hypocrisy in the mirror, questioning the structures they benefitted from while often feeling trapped within them. He mocked American masculinity — its obsession with conquest, its fear of vulnerability, its addiction to empire — and invited men to see themselves not as rulers of the world but as products of it,” DuBois wrote.

“Vidal’s men were sharp, politically aware, often bisexual or morally fluid, understanding that identity was both a performance and a prison. He planted in men’s minds the belief that if you weren’t willing to challenge the system, you were part of it — and if you wanted freedom, you had to face uncomfortable truths about who you were, what you desired, and what you were complicit in.

“John Updike, meanwhile, told men it was okay to feel.

“His men were confused, lustful, terrified of aging, perpetually restless in their marriages, and looking for transcendence in the bodies of women they often did not deserve. Updike gave men permission to see their boredom, their longing, their sexual frustrations, not as shameful failings, but as a fundamental part of being alive.

“But he also left men with the belief that their inner turmoil was something the world should revolve around, that their dissatisfaction was profound, and that the search for pleasure and meaning in the domestic was a noble, if doomed, quest.

“Between them, these two men planted conflicting beliefs into American men:

  • That sex is power (Vidal) and sex is salvation (Updike).
  • That politics is personal (Vidal) and personal suffering is political enough (Updike).
  • That masculinity is a performance to be deconstructed (Vidal) and masculinity is a tragic inheritance to be endured (Updike).

Men who read Vidal learned to distrust the system. Men who read Updike learned to distrust themselves. Together, they created a generation of men who wanted to be both aware and desired, critical and romantic, cynical and yearning.

Read the whole article.

Serbian scholar tells interviewer Updike remains relevant

Posted on by
Reply

ALA, Chicago, 2022

John Updike Society board member Biljana Dojčinović was recently interviewed by Charles Carlini of Casa Carlini publishing, who wished to confront the difficult questions underlying why Updike seems less read these days. “Did the sheer brilliance of his style mask a certain thematic narrowness? Were his lush sentences and psychological insights ultimately confined to the worldview of a privileged few? Such questions have sparked fresh debate about his rightful place in the literary canon.

“One of the sharpest voices in this conversation is Biljana Dojčinović, a scholar whose work pushes beyond easy categories. A professor of literary studies with expertise in Anglo-American modernism, Dojčinović brings a distinctly transnational lens to Updike’s fiction, interrogating how his narratives handle (or mishandle) issues of gender, power, and identity. Rather than slotting him neatly into the roles of either misunderstood genius or emblem of patriarchal excess, she urges readers to sit with the contradictions—those moments where Updike is most dazzling, and most troubling.”

Dojčinović cautioned, “When it comes to biases, we need to be careful not to confuse the author with his characters, nor with the assumptions and prejudices we ourselves bring to the reading experience.”

“It’s no coincidence that all great literary works are, in some way, critical of the times they depict,” Dojčinović said. “When a writer speaks from a certain distance, it creates space for us to reflect on what we’re reading. In the modernist style, there’s no guiding authorial voice—it’s up to us to decide what’s right or wrong. That can be challenging; irony, for instance, is often missed. And when that happens, the meaning of a work can be lost entirely.”

Asked how readers should “reconcile historical context with present-day critiques,” Dojčinović responded, “When we read literature from earlier periods—or even from different cultures—we need to stay mindful of the contextual differences. More than that, we should make an effort to learn about those contexts. Take slang, for example—it’s clear we shouldn’t apply contemporary meanings to a title like The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. And yet, we often impose our present-day values and interpretations onto works from the past or from unfamiliar cultures. That’s where many misunderstandings begin.”

Read the whole interview.

 

New Yorker previews upcoming John Updike Selected Letters volume

Posted on by
Reply

Members of The John Updike Society are looking forward to the release of the Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff and scheduled for October publication by Knopf, Updike’s main publisher since 1959. Members who attend the Roth-Updike Conference will have the chance to get signed copies in New York.  As a teaser, The New Yorker today posted “An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up: An epistolary history of a fifty-five-year relationship with The New Yorker, by John Updike.” The post is dated July 11, 2025, which is sure to confuse people in the future, regardless of whether they know Updike died in 2009.

The letters begin with a March 1949 query from Updike, still a high school student, asking for “some information on those little filler drawings you publish, and, I presume, buy. What size should they be? Mounted or not? Are there any preferences as to subject matter, weight of cardboard, and technique?”

The remaining letters are directed to various editors, his parents (whom he addresses as “Plowvillians”), and others that collectively give some sense of his relationship with The New Yorker. The final letter, addressed to fiction editor Deborah Treisman, is a poignant one, given that it was written just 17 days before Updike passed away:

“. . . I suppose of the many things I have tried to write, short stories have given me most gratification and unqualified pleasure. I am glad that what looks to be my last book, to be published this June, is short stories, called My Father’s Tears, probably the best of the bunch. But I would feel less happy about the collection if you and your editorial colleagues had not allowed me to cap it with two New Yorker acceptances—the little suburban fling in the power outage, and the rambling reminisce about happiness and sex and water and the little journey of a NE American life. I feel much happier about a collection that begins and ends with The New Yorker, where I began and ended.

1966 interview shows Updike in Ipswich

Posted on by
Reply

A 1966 interview, “John Updike: ‘One way to make a living that didn’t necessarily inflict pain on other people,'” is available to watch now on YouTube. Some of the questions overlap the Life magazine interview, so odds are it’s connected somehow. There’s a lot of footage of Updike and his young family inside the house and in the yard.

Writer-musician thinks Updike ‘underpraised’

Posted on by
Reply

We just discovered a blog entry by music journalist, musician, and street photographer Ted Burke: “John Updike’s Underpraised Genius” (posted May 10, 2024), in which Burke argued that “what the departed Updike leaves behind is one of the most impressive bodies of work a contemporary writer, American or otherwise, would want for a legacy.

“His Rabbit quartet of novels . . . is among the peerless accomplishments of 20th century fiction in its chronicle of living through the confusion of the Viet Nam war, feminism, civil rights and the sexual revolution in the person of the series’ titular character, Rabbit Angstrom. Not deep of thought but rich in resentment, Angstrom was an analog of American culture itself, a congested vein of self-seeking that never recovered from the raw sensation of youthful vigor; Angstrom, like the country itself, resentfully fumbled about for years ruing the loss of vitality and trying to replace it with new things, the crabby possessiveness of the middle class.”

Burke concluded, “If a writer’s task is, among others, to help us understand the actions that cause us to fall down and act badly despite our best intentions, Updike has performed a patriotic service. There should be some prize for that.”

Actually, there was. For his contributions to American culture, in two separate White House ceremonies Updike received the National Medal of Arts from Pres. George H.W. Bush in 1989 and the National Humanities Medal from Pres. George W. Bush in 2003.

Read Burke’s full post.

British writer uses Updike to intro a piece on booksigning

Posted on by
Reply

British novelist and short story writer William Boyd wrote a piece for The Spectator on a curious consequence of literary fame—mass booksignings—that began with an anecdote about John Updike:

“The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike’s novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies – guaranteed sales, of course, hard to refuse. They sweetened the pill by flying him to a Caribbean island for a couple of weeks and putting him up in a beachside bungalow. There, a team of assistants brought him 100 books at a time and he would sign away, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Updike was very droll about the discombobulating effects of signing your own name thousands upon thousands of times. It became an almost existential crisis. His signature became illegible; he began to wonder who this person ‘John Updike’ was and what relation he had to the automaton signing his name day after day.
“I feel I know something of what he went through. My publishers asked me to sign 6,000 so-called tip-in pages for the hardback of my new novel, The Predicament, that would be inserted into the book for an exclusive signed edition. No Caribbean island, alas.”
Read the whole article.

Updike’s American Everyman is referenced in a July 4 think piece

Posted on by
Reply

It’s July 4 in the U.S., and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is once again in the news—or rather, a think piece. Warning: Though Harry leaned right, The Nation, in which this piece by Jeet Heer appears, leans left. One statistic, though, seems more personal than political, because the comparison year (2004) is one during which another Republican president, George W. Bush, was in office:

Currently, “Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.”

Heer had written, “Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

“Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: ‘Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he had been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Read the whole article. 

Updike’s Rabbit makes a rise-of-suburbia list

Posted on by
Reply

Fritz Von Burkersroda posted on his site, Festivaltopia, a list of “19 Novels that captured the rise of the American suburb,” and John Updike’s 1960 novel Rabbit, Run was included.

“John Updike’s 1960 novel introduced readers to Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, perhaps the most iconic character in suburban literature. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle-class man who feels there is something missing from his life. The novel follows Rabbit as he flees his suburban responsibilities—his pregnant wife, his job, his entire life—in a desperate attempt to recapture the vitality of his youth. Frank Wheeler, Piet Hanema, Frank Bascombe – these are a handful of the suburban men in the fiction of Richard Yates, John Updike, and Richard Ford. These writers all display certain characteristics of the suburban novel in the post-WWII era: the male experience placed at the forefront of narration, the importance of competition both socially and economically, contrasting feelings of desire and loathing for predictability, and the impact of an increasingly developed landscape upon the American psyche and the individual’s mind. Updike’s genius was in making Rabbit both sympathetic and infuriating—a man whose suburban malaise drives him to make increasingly destructive choices. The novel launched a series that would span four decades, chronicling the evolution of suburban America through one man’s journey.”

Other titles that made the list include The Stepford Wives, Revolutionary Road, Little Children, The Ice Storm, The Corrections, Peyton Place, White Noise, Empire Falls, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Palisades, and John Cheever’s Collected Stories.