The Nov. 11 episode of BBC’s Front Row spotlighted art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer and radical Christianity, James Schiff on Selected Letters of John Updike, and director Edgar Wright on the new dystopian film The Running Man.
The Updike material begins around the 13:30 mark when the interviewer talks with writer Gish Jen, one of many who received letters from Updike.
There are so many interesting websites, blogs, and YouTube channels that you can find something “new” every day, it seems.
Today that new discovery was GOATPoets, which featured John Updike reading “An Oddly Lovely Day Alone,” a poem that has echoes of Richard Maple making due while Joan is off and about.
On Feb. 1, 2026, Martin Wenglinsky, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University, posted on his blog the first of his two-part examination of John Updike’s futuristic novel, Toward the End of Time, which he called a “deficient” or “deformed” epic.
“Let me explain,” Wenglinsky wrote. “An epic is a story of war and family and a journey and one or more heroic protagonists and what might be endlessly elaborated episodes that convey some deep meaning about human nature, while novels, which are another kind of deformed epics, have protagonists whose histories are never retold but made up and just trying to manage life.”
In Toward the End of Time, Wenglinsky wrote, “The war envisioned is a limited exchange of atomic weapons between China and the United States that takes place a few decades in the future of the time the novel was published. The people in the novel are civilians trying to cope with the aftermath, which makes sense because the war that engulfed the world in the second half of the twentieth century was the Cold War, which had hot skirmishes in Korea and Vietnam and the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan, but unlike in other wars mostly in prospect, a full out exchange never happening even if many predicted it, imaginations filled with the nuclear apocalypse just thirty minutes away from total mutual destruction. So this war is a science fiction war, and Updike’s innovation is that there is a limited exchange so that the United States has had severe but not total annihilation, which is different from apocalyptic science fiction projections as happens in Shute’s On the Beach (1957), or Christopher’s No Blade of Glass (1956) or Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) or to my mind the most scary documentary style BBC production, Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984)) which showed the reduction of England to a medieval economy and society. Rather, the United States, in Updike’s imagination, remains organized even if diminished and it is unclear whether it will recover or fall into anarchy.
“Updike’s novel is no reduction of a society into Hobbesian anarchy. Seafood is shipped from the East Coast to the decimated Midwest. Commerce also continues in that protection rackets spring up and young women openly advertise their personal services in the major newspapers and a local scrip has replaced the United States dollar but there are still country clubs and Federal Express and mail service and a diminished food market in some stands around downtown Boston. What Updike retains from the apocalyptic genre, which is only somewhere in the epic mode, as is the case with “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (c. 1400), which is full of foreboding about what will be the fatal mistake of the hero, is a sense of dread and despair: that something even worse will happen and that the eventual fate cannot be avoided however people battle on to restore what was once normal life. Achieving that tone in a less than complete apocalypse is a considerable achievement for Updike.
“But there is much more going on than that,” Wenglinsky wrote.
Read Part 1 of his essay, “John Updike: Toward the End of Time“
In “How John Updike Died and Got Better,” an essay that’s both artful and thoughtful, Alexander Sorondo wrote, “John Updike wrote and published constantly for 40 years. More than 70 titles. Thousands of articles. Mostly for The New Yorker. He sold millions of books and his Rabbit Angstrom quartet is celebrated as a pillar of American literary achievement in the 20th century. . . . Couples was a hit. It earned him $1 million if you include the $400,000 movie rights. . . . It got him on the cover of Time magazine. He was on there again in 1982 when Rabbit Is Rich won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Ten years later he published a sequel and they gave him another Pulitzer for it (only the third American to ever win it twice). Then a PEN/Faulkner Award after that and he got a Guggenheim too at some point. He appeared multiple times on Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose and he was the subject of documentaries and biographies and critical anthologies and an academic periodical that endures to this day.
“He died in 2009.
“And then everyone stopped reading him.
“I think they’ll start again,” Sorondo wrote.
William J. Donahue just published a piece on his blog that first appeared in the fall/winter 2024 edition of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal as part of a feature story about John Updike, who was born in adjacent Berks County.
In “The Writer Who Changed Me More Than Any Other,” Donahue wrote, “Prior to the summer of 2009, the name John Updike meant almost nothing to me. All I knew was that he belonged to a certain class of writer—white, male, and, as of January 27 of that year, dead.”
“Everything changed when a college professor friend introduced me to one of Updike’s best-known short stories, ‘A&P,'” he wrote. “A coming-of-age story about herring snacks, Queenie’s scandalously bare shoulders, and Sammy’s gesture of occupational seppuku, ‘A&P’ opened my eyes to something new. It also compelled me to explore Updike’s short-story collections, followed by his longer works: the Rabbit novels, Couples, Of the Farm, Marry Me, S., A Month of Sundays, etc. His novel-slash-collection The Maples Stories, which catalogs the adolescence, life, death, and afterlife of a specific New England couple’s marriage, had the greatest impact on me.
“Like his other novels, Maples features rich prose that reminds me of a well-crafted poem. The story follows Joan and Richard Maple, imperfect spouses who struggle and persevere, expand and contract, destroy themselves, and then find their respective paths to post-divorce reinvention. As someone who spent much of his thirties wrestling with his own personal and professional bugbears, I found Maples inspiring, if not prescriptive.”
Trevor Meek, of The Local News (Ipswich, Mass.), published a Jan. 31, 2026 piece on the Selected Letters of John Updike that began,
“Living in Ipswich in the 1960s and ’70s with John Updike as a neighbor meant playing a high-stakes game of literary roulette. “On any given day, you might crack open his newest novel or short story to discover you’d been immortalized — or perhaps skewered — on a page destined to be read by millions around the world. “That uneasy thrill returned for some folks late last year with the release of Selected Letters of John Updike.
“’Even with this book, various people are looking through it to see if they’re mentioned,’ said Updike’s son, Michael, a sculptor. “’And then when they realize they are mentioned, they’re insulted,’ he added with a laugh.”
Michael Updike, heavily quoted in the article, defended his father against one of the most common charges. “He seems to be an author who is judged as a misogynist because some of his characters are selfish. . . . We don’t say Nabokov is a pedophile because his character Humbert Humbert is one in Lolita.”
Michael Updike told The Local News that he’s working on the release of his father’s unpublished novel, Home. “We’re still figuring out how to get that rolling,” he said.
We asked Michael (pictured) for more details, and here’s what he had to say:
“Chris Carduff [who edited several of Updike’s Library of America volumes] gave us the idea, saying it was a completed novel albeit rejected by a publishing house. Jim Schiff [editor of the Selected Letters] has read it and says it’s not a perfect novel but does have a lot of new material about my grandmother in it. Andrew Wylie has been sent a copy and he thinks it should be published. So much of it is hand written, and our first step is to find a good typist who will type it up in Word. Then an editor to comb out any redundant or rough spots, and Wiley will shop it around. No timeline, but hopefully soon, by publishing terms—two or three years.”
Updike didn’t talk much about Home with interviewers, but he did tell Eric Rhode in 1969, ” I had written, prior to [The Poorhouse Fair], while living in New York City, a 600-page novel, called, I think, Home, and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of 16 or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel.”
If Home is as heavily autobiographical as Updike suggests, perhaps it will be read and appreciated as a companion to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989).
Marc Chacksfield has recommended “The books that will actually make you laugh: The funniest novels ever written”—a list published on shortlist.com. And one of Updike’s novels tickled his funnybone: The Witches of Eastwick (1984).
Of Witches, Chacksfield wrote, “The big screen adaptation is naturally hilarious, but Updike’s original source material is a wonderful exercise in satire. Three women in the Rhode Island town of Eastwick acquire witch-like powers after being spurned by their husbands. Swearing to wreak vengeance, they run amok until the mysterious appearance of Darryl Van Horne. What follows is high farce and social satire rolled into one. Mischievous doesn’t begin to cover it.”
Of course, there’s no shortage of humor in Updike, whether you tag along with his Jewish alter ego Henry Bech in three novels, savor the satire of American overconsumption in The Coup, or chuckle over Updike’s minister in A Month of Sundays who is sent to a retreat as a curative for his penchant of sexually fleecing his flock.
In Sheena Meng’s “A requiem for Raritan,” published on The Point, one thing rings pointedly clear: “The editors were not particularly fond of Updike. Richard Poirier and Thomas R. Edwards, both literary critics and professors of literature at Rutgers, leveled coolly disdainful gazes at him in their 1978 proposal for the magazine:
The publication of a new book by John Updike, let us say, is probably not an event of the same magnitude as the publication of a new book by Bellow or Pynchon, by Elizabeth Bishop or Doris Lessing … He seems at the moment to be a writer of comparatively, and predictably, lesser weight, and for whatever reasons he does not call into play the cultural forces and special interests that are at work on behalf (or against) these other writers.
“It was their mutual confusion regarding Updike’s popularity that also solidified matters between Poirier and his successor, Rutgers historian Jackson Lears. One of the questions he had hoped to address when he founded the magazine, Poirier told Lears, was: How does a writer like John Updike get lionized and celebrated as if he’s some genius man of letters? Raritan, in other words, was interested in “cultural power,” as Poirier declared in his prefatory editor’s note: “those intricate movements by which ideas or events, canons or hierarchies of preference, minorities or cultural strata come into existence.” Updike, not considered ‘a sufficiently rewarding clue to something more important than the texts he writes,’ was given no notice in its pages.”
Sounds like Raritan‘s editors may have socialized with famous Updike detractors John Aldridge or David Foster Wallace, since all of the writers they cite as being superior have occasioned relatively the same level of interest from readers, and graduate students working on their theses or dissertations, as Updike.
James Schiff, vice president of The John Updike Society and editor of The John Updike Review, gave a great interview to Charles McElwee on The Real Clear Pennsylvania Podcast. Schiff, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, talked about the Selected Letters of John Updike, which Schiff also edited and the debut of which the Updike Society celebrated in New York City in October 2025.
Andrew Gelman, in reviewing The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers for The Future of Statistical Modeling (Substack), relies on John Updike and Philip Roth for a core comparison:
“Going back a bit in literary time, The Ten Year Affair is a lot like the novels of John Updike: various suburban married couples having affairs. The writing style is different–Updike is famously lyrical, whereas Somers uses a Millennial flat writing style: This happens, then This happens, then That happens, etc. Kind of like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver if they had a sense of humor.
“I think Somers does a much better job than Updike in conveying what it feels like to be a parent. To me, Updike, like Philip Roth, was to the end of his life always a son, never a father. Updike did have four kids, but I guess his wife did most of the parenting. Updike’s characters often have children but always seem to be thinking only about themselves. Not so much that his adult characters are self-centered–I mean, yeah, they are, but that’s kind of the point–but more that their children don’t seem to exist at all, except to the extent that they sometimes have to be dealt with as obstacles when they get in the way of the parents. In contrast, the adults in The Ten Year Affair are very aware of their kids. In some ways this is similar to Little Children by Tom Perotta, a book whose entire theme is that these adults are thinking only of themselves and are not shouldering the responsibilities of parenthood.”