In Memoriam: James N. Trexler

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We are saddened to report the passing of James N. Trexler, a classmate of John Updike’s who was part of a panel at the very first John Updike Society conference at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa. Trexler died of AML at age 93, and his obituary made a single reference to Updike:

“[Trexler] often joked that he ‘majored in swim team, wood shop, and typing’—a fitting description for the man his classmate John Updike once referred to as the ‘class clown’.”

Jim graduated from Shillington H.S. in 1950 and from Albright College in 1958, serving a stint in the U.S. Air Force in between. A people person with a sharp wit, Jim “worked as a sales manager for Columbia Cutlery while coordinating logistics with Ennis Manufacturing. After ‘retiring’ in 1993, he served as the Terminal and Operations Manager for Landis Transportation and concluded his career at Mark Metals, where he worked until age 82.”

The obituary added that Jim was known for his “incredible wit, generosity, integrity, and genuine interest in hours,” and Updike Society members experienced that first-hand in 2010 when he not only participated in the panel but hung around to talk with conference attendees. Pictured below is that panel, with Jim on the right, next to fellow H.S. classmates Harlan Boyer, Jackie Herneisen Kendall, Joan V. Youngerman, and moderator Jack De Bellis. We were privileged to learn from him and enjoy his company. Our condolences to his wife, Evelyn, daughter Joellen Trexler Nelson, son Andy, and other family members.

Brattleboro Literary Festival spends an hour with Michael Updike and James Schiff

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Since the Selected Letters of John Updike was published in October 2025, there have been dozens of interviews with the volume’s editor, James Schiff, and with Michael Updike, the family’s representative on the John Updike Literary Trust, who also has been doing readings and talks to promote the book.

If you only have time to listen to one of the interviews, this hour-long free-flowing conversation might be the one. For this interview, Michael is assisted by his wife, Olga Karasik-Updike, a Philip Roth and John Updike scholar. Even John Updike Society members who have known Schiff and Updike for decades will hear things for the first time. It’s an engaging, insightful  show billed as “A Literary Cocktail Hour,” recorded on May 13, 2026 and hosted by Jenny Altshuler. Here’s the link.

Blogger reconsiders ‘Rabbit Redux’

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In a brief post on Books, Inq., a Blogspot blog, Jesse Freedman wrote, “I didn’t think too much — as I recall — of Rabbit, Run, but now, having returned to Updike, and having finished Rabbit Redux, let me take that all back: at his prime, Updike packed a serious punch.”

But Freedman took exception with the way the book had been marketed, especially a quote from the Sunday Times that appeared on the back cover of the British edition of Redux.

“That quotation attempts to sell Updike’s vision as one in which he ‘transfigures the commonplace’ into something ‘beautiful.’ Let’s stop there: I don’t read Rabbit Redux in that way at all. In fact, I understand the novel as attempting to assert the opposite: namely that there’s an unbearable banality to the commonplace, and that boredom and sexuality are what propel the suburban experience in America. Rabbit Redux is less a celebration of the average, the mediocre, and far more an evaluation of the ways they persist, of how they interact. There’s lots of intercourse in Updike’s world, but much of it is pained; rarely is it ecstatic — as you might expect from a marketing quotation like the one on the Penguin edition. Rabbit Redux, despite the sales pitch, really is a triumph: a sorrowful, hip, urgent novel composed at the intersection of many worlds: those racial, those violent, those political. The book is a reminder that even the most common moments are subject to external factors, and that while sex may bring two people together, it is rarely enough for them to truly communicate.”

 

Third Updike Casitas fellow now in residence

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Taylor Brown, whose novel-in-progress Rise, River, Rise rose to the top of the applicant pool for the 2026 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship, is now at the casitas where Updike worked in a number of genres and famously described losing a favorite hat in the parking lot (“A Desert Encounter,” The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 2008). The two-week residency is made possible by the generosity of owners Jan and Jim Emery, who rent the casitas for much of the year. See the Grants, Scholarships & Awards page for details about next year’s competition.

Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ makes list of books ‘That Capture This American Moment’

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Time magazine asked “25 literary luminaries to pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation’s history and beyond its borders . . . . a reading list to match this moment.”

Ron Chernow, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life and recently published a biography of Mark Twain, picked the second volume in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux:

“Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike’s extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Writer Ian McEwan and actor Cillian Murphy have called Updike’s collective Rabbit novels their choice for Great American Novel.

“25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” posted May 12, 2026

Journalist recalls an awkward encounter with Updike in Rome

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In addition to English, Rome-based freelance journalist Eric J. Lyman is fluent in Spanish and Italian. But words in any language seemed just shy of his reach when in spring, circa 2003-05, he “spotted John Updike having lunch near the Spanish Steps.

“He was seated at an outdoor table with a woman in her 50s. Short sandy hair, navy-blue blazer. She could have been his Italian publisher or agent. He wore a plaid coat and a pale tie. They were talking easily. Their plates were gone, but the water glasses were still on the table, along with a small, neat stack of books.”

Lyman said that as he approached them and considered a possible introductory line, “They both looked up before I could make a sound. And I suddenly froze, then turned, then disappeared around the corner.” More aborted attempts followed—an unusual thing to happen to a seasoned journalist. As Lyman wrote, “I don’t rattle easily. I’ve covered wars, jumped out of airplanes. I’ve interviewed presidents, been blessed by a pope, attended parties with Hollywood celebrities,” so this was new territory for him. But don’t feel too bad, Mr. Lyman. Despite your awkward encounter, at least you fared better than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Dick Diver, who, in Tender Is the Night, got into a drunken brawl with taxi drivers at the top of the Spanish Steps.

Read the whole essay, “The Writer Who Knew Too Much: A story about losing my nerve among the literary ghosts around the Spanish Steps,” posted on Lyman’s blog, The ITALIAN DISPATCH.

 

 

James Schiff and Michael Updike to talk about the Selected Letters via Zoom session

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If you haven’t been able to attend one of the events featuring Selected Letters of John Updike editor James Schiff and Michael Updike, the author’s son, here’s your chance:

The Brattleboro Literary Festival invites everyone to join them on Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 4pm Central Time for a session featuring Schiff and Michael Updike “in conversation with Schiff’s book . . . which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and listed as one of The New Yorker‘s Best Books of the Year and one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of the Fall.”

Registration is required. Here’s the link.

Tweeter says Updike invented The Elaine

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Christopher J. Scalia tweeted that “John Updike invented The Elaine.” As Exhibit A he offered this description from Updike’s short story “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1958):

“There being no answer to Neil, I went into the living room, where Margaret, insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone. Somewhat in time to the music she would run a few steps, then snap her body like a whip, her chin striking her chest and her hands flying backward, fingers fanned, as her shoulders pitched forward.”

Click here to see The Elaine (GIF) 

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. After all, Seinfeld did tell The Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert in an interview that Updike’s hyper-detailed descriptions make him laugh “more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

“Updike, to me, was insane,” Seinfeld said. “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. . . . 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.” That’s why Seinfeld said he’d choose Updike for one of the three writers, dead or alive, that he’d invite to a dinner party.

 

 

 

 

Was Updike anti-semitic or just mean spirited?

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Those who attended the joint Updike and Roth societies conference in Greenwich Village in October 2025 found two groups that, like their namesakes, were friendly rivals . . . mostly friendly. Only one person had an obvious axe to grind, which made members of both societies uncomfortable. And that person just published a well-written, thought-provoking article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Updike and the Jews.” Jesse Saich was reacting to Updike’s satirical Jewish alter-ego, Henry Bech, and the three volumes that allowed Updike to poke fun of the Jewish writers that he called the “chief glory” of postwar American fiction. Saich wondered,

“Why had Updike invented this de-Judaized Jew? ‘I find myself, in what should be an uncompetitive field, terribly jealous,’ Updike said in 1966. In a later interview, Updike was frank: All the attention paid to Jewish rivals annoyed him. ‘Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also.’ Reading the Bech stories, one senses another motive. ‘Your ideas are the product . . . of spite,’ a character tells Bech. ‘There is somebody you want to get even with.’ Bingo. Bech was a way of ‘working out various grudges,’ Updike confessed.”

But, as Saich admitted, “Even Updike’s detractors generally come around. ‘Long ago I wrote a nervous review of Bech for Commentary,’ Cynthia Ozick told Updike, offering apologies and congratulations (‘Mazel tov!’) on Updike’s Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, why not forgive? In every era, great writing springs from poisoned minds. Trollope disliked ‘low, disgusting Jews.’ Thackeray resented ‘sheenies.’ ‘What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.’ The author? None other than fair-minded George Orwell.

“A writer, Updike once said, is entitled to his bigotries. And so he was. Does that vitiate his art? Can we reject a novel’s morality but admire its beauty? I’ve always thought so, but now I’m not sure. On some level, reading entails submission to an author’s way of seeing. When we’re swept away, we become, for that moment, the author’s partner. In such complicity are the risks and rewards of great literature.”

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Updike, Irwin Shaw, P.K. Dick, and Joan Maple?

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In a recent blog-post musing, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, talked about picking up a copy of the LOA two-volume set of Updike’s Collected Stories and reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Which led him to recall a similarly titled story by Irwin Shaw, “Main Currents of American Thought,” which led him (come on, keep up!) to think that rather than having anything in common with Shaw, “Updike is similar to Philip K. Dick as a writer in that he takes the same few characters and recycles them through lots of similar situations.

“Dick has the pathetic lead character (‘Joe Chip’), the reliable older man (‘Runciter’), and the nagging wife (the sister in Confessions of a Crap Artist). Updike has the ‘Updike’ character (a student or young man in the early stories, then a young husband and father, then a divorcing middle-aged man, then a rueful man in late middle age, drifting among his own thoughts) along with various supporting characters.”

Which leads Gelman, finally, to, “I like lots of individual Updike stories but I’ve gotta say that the best are the Maples stories because these are the only ones where the woman character is as strong as the man. Joan gives as good as she gets.” Then back again to “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

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