A&E Book Club recommends Updike

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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’s Rabbit 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.”

Pennsylvania History considers The Pennsylvania Updike

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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.”

Chicago writer offers his take on Rabbit, Run

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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.”

Read the whole review

New Yorker Cartoonists blogger spills the contents of their Summer Library

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For his August 16, 2022 post at Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin began,

“For the past twenty-seven summers, my wife, Liza Donnelly, and I have gone to the same Downeast home, and over those years, have built a small library of books, some New Yorker-centric (but many having nothing to do with the magazine).” Depicted in the photo are “most of the books either brought here or bought here at library book sales.”

“Occasionally,” Maslin confessed, “I take a book back to New York,” depriving their growing summer library of the volume—such as James Thurber’s The Seal in the Bedroom, which flippered back with them last year at summer’s end.

“The titles by Liebling, Benchley, Capote, Beattie are like good friends,” Maslin wrote. “I enjoy seeing them, being around them. Adam Begley’s Updike biography came up with us this year. I’m on my third read through, visiting parts I just had to experience again (last night I re-read the part about Updike driving into Manhattan to meet William Shawn for the very first time, but having to delay the meeting by a day because he (Updike) got lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey). Someone should do a collection of pieces about Updike driving. About a decade ago, at a library sale up near the Canadian border, I found a first edition of Updike’s Rabbit, Run (still dust-jacketed) for about 75 cents. That too went back to New York to sit on the Updike shelf.”

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UK authors and critics pick the best novels since Ulysses

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First UK edition.

Ulysses turned 100 this year, and to mark the occasion, The Sunday Times (UK) asked a jury of authors and critics to pick “the finest novels published since [James] Joyce’s classic.” Though Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) that continues to make lists such as this.

Nine of The Times’ 14 jurists were women. “Between them they have read thousands of books, and their choices reflect this: the oldest book was published in 1924, the most recent in 2009. The list includes writers from Britain, Ireland, the US, Nigeria, India and South Africa, with subject matter just as diverse. You will find scalp-hunting outlaws, organ-donating clones and Wall Street traders.”

Of Updike’s novel, which the jury ranked #43, The Times wrote, “In high school Harry Angstrom was a basketball star. Now he’s a 26-year-old salesman, living in the suburbs with his wife, Janice, and son, Nelson. Bored and unsatisfied, he runs away and shacks up with a prostitute in his home town. The search for freedom is a classic American narrative, and here it’s told with aplomb, in charged, fierce prose.”

Read the full article.

John Updike had strong opinions about book design

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Carol Devine Carson, a designer at Alfred A. Knopf, summarized what it was like designing a book cover for John Updike: “He was very hands on,” she told Eye on Design writer Rachel Berger. “You had to learn what he liked in order to get anything approved.” Carson and designer Chip Kidd said Updike’s “likes” were consistent, Berger wrote. “For body copy, Janson of course. For jackets, Updike favored Albertus, a craggy Depression-era display face with tapering serifs resembling letters carved in metal, centered and in all caps. He loved certain shades of blue. He preferred 18-point type. Original art, yes. Contemporary photography, no. ‘He didn’t want to see too much letter spacing or type used in any kind of bizarre way,’ recalled Carson. ‘It was very straightforward,'” whereas Kidd and Carson’s design tastes were varied.

Chip Kidd’s design with Updike’s sticky note requested changes.

Updike’s first ambition was to become an artist, and all of his dust jackets proudly list the year he spent at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. Visitors to The John Updike Childhood Home can see numerous examples of his work.

What did Kidd, a Reading native who was a keynote speaker at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference, think of Updike’s design sensibilities? Consider the famous dust jacket for Rabbit, Run, which Updike designed. “What about that cover suggests middle class suburbia?” Kidd wondered. “Unless I’m missing something, conceptually it doesn’t mean anything”—those patterned thin yellow, green and blue stripes with a large circle in the center.

“I would call Updike’s design taste very conservative,” Kidd told Berger, contrasting it with his own aesthetic, which was “just completely all over the place.” Berger wrote that Kidd and Updike occasionally “butted heads,” with one letter to editor Judith Jones “requesting ‘no Kiddian theatrics, please’ for an upcoming title.”

Read the full article

New-old review of Updike’s Roger’s Version appears

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The Cratudemn.com blog recently posted an unsigned, undated “Book Review: John Updike’s Version of Roger.”

“This book is less an emotional exercise than an intellectual gambit, with the provability of the Almighty as its leitmotif. While to prove the existence of the Judeo-Christian God is certainly not a new sport, Updike chooses to play by significantly different rules than those that constrain the likes of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Hume, Kant” and instead “launches his argumentative and theological rays against the backdrop of modern scientific thought and method, evoking evolution, the Big Bang, and the binary oddball of today’s supercomputers. Planck and Heisenberg collide with Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, resulting in an electrical charge that permeates Updike’s always literate and frequently erudite pages,” the author writes.

Read the full review

Julian Barnes echoes Updike’s love of books, with greater optimism

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From a recently published piece by Julian Barnes on “Books, Books, Books” that was a version of a speech delivered at Christie’s, London “to mark First Editions, Second Thoughts, an auction of annotated first edition books and works of art from internationally renowned contemporary artists and authors, in support of English PEN”:

“I have been a book reader, a book buyer, a book sniffer, a book collector and, in recent times, a regretful book discarder,” said Barnes, who also quoted American Anglophile essayist Logan Pearsal Smith: “Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Barnes added, “This is funny and wry, but in my view entirely wrong. Reading isn’t something you do when you’re not living, or when life has let you down, or you are incapacitated in some way. Nor is reading just a part of living. Reading is living, and only reading fully explains what this thing called life is.”

Recalling Updike, Barnes asked, “And what of the Future of the Book, that question much posed in recent times. The physical book, that is. John Updike, in a late poem, ‘The Author Observes his Birthday, 2005’, wrote lovingly of his early years of being a writer and of seeing ‘my halt words strut in type’. He goes on:

“[…] And then to have my spines
line up upon the shelf, one more each year,
however out of kilter ran my life!

“I too remember that feeling, though in my case it was more like a book every two years. In the same poem, Updike writes with melancholy – indeed pessimism – of the future of the printed book:

“A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? The printed page
was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder.

“I am much less pessimistic. Book-buying, as we saw, went up during lockdown. The appetite for the physical book appears undiminished, perhaps even increasing. The physical book is, as someone else might put it, the perfect piece of delivery equipment for what it contains – words, pleasure, truth. But I’m sure I don’t have to convince any of you of that.”

Lethbridge Herald writer sees mixed messages in Updike’s The Coup

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In the Lethbridge Herald [Canada], Trevor Busch wrote, “Today’s Africa is finally a reawakening giant” that “seems increasingly ready to join a family of nations as developed and free societies.

“In the early 1970s, things were much different. Africa was a wild west of cowboy diplomacy as both the Soviet Bloc and the United States faced off in numerous African backwaters over ideological differences, with both sides arming their own ideologicallly-friendly regimes in a deadly game of Cold War cat and mouse.

“Unfortunately freedom—no matter what side of the political spectrum Africans found themselves under these various regimes—was an unintended casualty of proxy warfare.

“American novelist John Updike stepped into this maelstrom with The Coup (1978). Set in a fictional sub-Saharan African nation known as Kush during the early 1970s, it follows the struggles of dictator Col. Ellellou in attempting to prevent a pro-Western coup from sweeping him from power and instituting a style of government and economy he most hates.”

Busch added, “While The Coup closely follows events in Africa involving Col. Ellellou and his failing regime, it also serves as a scathing rebuke of American Cold War foreign policy in Africa, and is illustrative of the contradictions and hypocrisy that were inherent in both superpowers propping up tin-pot dictators in the name of freedom. . . . Through the hybrid character of Ellellou, Updike takes the reader on a journey that exposes the best and worst of 20th century Africa as well as America.”

“Although Ellellou is nothing if not a fascinating character . . . it tends to beg the question how he attained power in the first place, something which Updike mostly side-steps in the novel.

“Other characters in The Coup are sometimes almost laughingly one-sided, especially women, who serve almost no purpose for Ellellou other than sexual concubines for his satisfaction. . . . While Updike’s The Coup is a fascinating exploration of how late 20th century Americans viewed their nation’s own foreign policy choices through the viewpoint of a hostile but perceptive outsider, the novel falls entirely short of greatness.

“The reader is left wondering if The Coup is meant to be an abstract polemic or a realistic tale of a violent change of government in a poor African nation.”

Or perhaps a third possibility that seems to resonate with American readers: That it’s a comic novel, a satire of American over-consumption and arrogance, as well as a satire of the African dictators caught in the middle of all these Cold War shenanigans?