John Updike is no stranger to subscribers of the Library of America series, but this time he’s just one contributor out of many. For Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology, dance critic Mindy Aloff has assembled a collection of essays and other forms written by “dancers and dance creators, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers” to tell the story of dance in America “from tap and swing to ballet and modern dance, from Five Points to Radio City Music Hall, and from the Lindy Hop to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk.”
Among the contributors are Edwin Denby, Joan Acocella, Lincoln Kirstein, Jill Johnston, Clive Barnes, George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Allegra Kent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, Langston Hughes, Susan Sontag, Stuart Hodes, Alastair Macaulay, Zora Neale Hurston, Arlene Croce, Yehuda Hyman, and Updike. Updike’s essay is on “Genial, Kinetic Gene Kelly.”
Novelist Deborah Moggach was asked by a Guardian reader to recommend books that could help her cope with the changes of body and mind that come from aging. And in response posted June 29, 2019, Moggach writes,
“Plenty of novelists have reflected on this as they themselves grow old. Philip Roth and John Updike spring to mind, and in fact I’d recommend Updike’s Rabbit series, taking us, as it does, through a man’s life into his last years (though it’s rather a shock to find the hero banging on about being ancient when he’s only 65).”
Lowdon resurrects and rejects David Foster Wallace’s “Great Male Narcissist” charge, saying, “In 2019 we have lots of things to say about autobiography and self-absorption, but string them together and you get some very snarly knicker elastic indeed. Is self-absorbed fiction always narcissistic, or only if it’s written by a straight white male?”
Lowdon also asks, of the attacks on Bellow, Updike, Roth, “then . . . Martin Amis? Ian McEwan? . . . . The tide is undeniably on its way out, sucking at the shins of Jonathan Franzen and Safran Foer, authors who didn’t get the memo, and persist in writing big, confident novels full of sex and thinly veiled autobiography.”
In taking on Wallace’s implied contention that Toward the End of Time should have contained “more about Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest and less about penises,” Lowdon scolds, “This breaches the first of Updike’s own elegant rules for reviewing, as stated in the introduction to his prose collection Picked-Up Pieces (1975): ‘Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.’
“But 2019 wants to know why we should play by Updike’s rules. Increasingly, fiction is judged on content over style. Updike chooses to write about an asshole with a penis: if you don’t want to read a book about assholes with penises, then Updike has written a bad book,” Lowdon writes, tongue-in-cheek.
All that said, she proceeds to review the Library of America’s reissued volume of Updike’s first four novels, pointing out the “cracks and damp patches so that you know exactly what it is you’re getting into. Because Updike’s apartment in the many-windowed House of Fiction is a beautiful place, and it would be a great shame if people stopped hanging out there altogether.”
Later, Lowdon writes of the “male gaze”, “As a woman, I’d rather be looked at by Updike than lectured at by Wallace. And as a reader, I’ll take any number of ill-judged mythological parallels and over-ambitious sentences [in The Centaur] for the generous quantities of ‘rich life-cake’, in Bellow’s phrase, that Updike serves up.'”
That’s what The Washington Post Book World staff concluded. At age 41, “You may feel like fleeing sometimes, but remember: Selfishness is not a victimless crime.” So read John Updike’s best-known novel, Rabbit, Run at that age, they say.
“Books for the Ages” is a fun new addition to the recommended books lists that pop up with the frequency of yard dandelions. At age 1, the Book World staff suggests you try The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. At Sweet Sixteen, turn to Jane Eyre because “Nobody understands you and your terribly unfair life. Reader, you are not alone.” At 18, it’s Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs that they recommend, because “There are many important lessons to learn in college, not all of them from books.” At 21? What else besides Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “You’re old enough to drink and carouse with your friends. Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Not all the recommended books are fiction. When you turn 65, the authors recommend reading 65 Things to Do When You Retire, edited by Mark Evan Chimsky. “If you need ideas, Jimmy Carter, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem have suggestions.” And if you make it to age 100? Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author by Herman Wouk. “Life is a wonderful adventure. Books make it even better.”
In under three weeks Updike fans can finally read the much-anticipated Updike & Politics: New Considerations, edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill.
Cover image: James Plath
The collection of essays, to be published on July 15 by Lexington Books, features essays from Marshall Boswell, Kirk Curnutt, Dill, Biljana Dojcinovic, Michial Farmer, Ethan Fishman, Yoav Fromer, Jo Gill, Louis Gordon, Sylvie Mathé, Takashi Nakatani, Judie Newman, James Schiff, Pradipta Sengupta, Shipe, and Aleksandra Vukotic.
As the back cover copy proclaims, “Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of John Updike’s political thought, Updike & Politics establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. Bringing together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, France, Serbia, Israel, and the United Kingdom, this volume presents the most comprehensive exploration of the rich political commentary that runs through Updike’s work. Like Updike himself, the collection endeavors to be comprehensive as it covers a wide range of the work he produced during his fifty-year career, including his too-often overlooked poetry and his single play [Buchanan Dying]. The chapters address a variety of political issues, from the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence, to the more divisive issues in Updike’s work such as race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and the rise of neoliberalism.”
“This collection of essays adds depth to our understanding of Updike as a political writer,” writes Liliana M. Naydan (Penn State Abington) in her cover blurb. “The book is especially valuable to scholars of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century literature for its investigations of intersections between the personal and the political. It exposes Updike’s nuanced perspectives on institutions such as the American presidency, and it provides thought-provoking explorations of politically charged and transformative American experiences including the War in Vietnam, the Cold War, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
We are saddened to report the passing of Updike Society member Ann W. Cassar, who died on May 20, 2019 at the age of 86. Over the years Ann has helped numerous Updike scholars with their research, and society members will miss her bright intellect and warm personality. Although the memorial service has already been held, those who fondly remember Ann can still offer condolences on the Paganof Funeral Home website. As the obituary below reminds, Ann wasn’t just a society member; she was a classmate of Updike’s who shared the lofty distinction of being co-valedictorian in the Shillington High School Class of 1950 . . . with John Updike.
“Ann W. Cassar, 86, of Concord Township, PA passed away on May 20, 2019 at Riddle Hospital. Born in Shillington, PA to Luther and Martha Weik, she lived in Wilmington, DE briefly before moving to Concord Township where she resided over 50 years. Ann graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian with author, John Updike, in 1950. She attended Albright College, graduating Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelors in Chemistry in 1954. Upon graduation she worked at the technical library indexing lab reports at Atlas Powder Co. (now Astra-Zeneca). She left Atlas to raise her family, returning to work as a freelance indexer until 2017 for major publishers in the US and India.
“Ann had a passion and talent for music, playing cello in the Delaware County Symphony, several string quartets and many community productions. She was instrumental in the production of an annual Messiah sing-along at the Brandywine Baptist Church which she attended most of her life. Interest in her family’s genealogy led her to become an active participant in the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association. In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by her husband, Richard Cassar who died in 2018, a son, David Cassar, and her sister Jean Hertzog. She is survived by two sons, Thomas Cassar (Jill Sanders) and James Cassar (Tianjia Wang) as well as three grandchildren, Rachel, Grace and Chelsea Cassar. A visitation will be held on June 9, 2019, Sunday, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. at the Pagano Funeral Home, 3711 Foulk Rd. Garnet Valley, PA followed by a Memorial Service at 1:00 p.m. Online condolences may be made by visiting www.paganofuneralhome.com.”
We will miss Ann, and we offer our deepest condolences to her family.
In a video post on the Library of America website titled “Adam Gopnik: The secret behind John Updike’s productivity,” the New Yorker writer called Updike the “first fully expressed American writer”—meaning there was nothing of his that he didn’t leave behind that readers wished he had. He wrote everything, and he wrote it well. Why?
We won’t give that away. For that, you’ll have to watch the short video, because Gopnik’s answer has the weight of a punch line.
Radojka Vukčević, the editor of the peer-reviewed Belgrade English Language & Literature Studies, attended the 5th John Updike Society Conference in Serbia and was impressed with the quality of papers presented, just as members were impressed by Belgrade BELLS. Three of those conference papers were recently published in Volume 11 (2019):
—”Recreation of the Second Degree: Updike’s Shakespeare in Translation,” by Alexander Shurbanov —”John Updike’s The Centaur and the Artist Divided,” by James Plath —”Psychic Sexuality: Memory and Dream in John Updike’s Villages,” by Pradipta Sengupta
It doesn’t add so much as a penny to your Amazon order total, and the website is identical. But if you bookmark https://smile.amazon.com and shop there instead of amazon.com, you can choose a charity to benefit . . . and we hope you’ll decide to support John Updike Society and our continued efforts to create a world-class literary site and museum in The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa. This is not a gimmick, and you do not end up on someone’s mailing list. It’s the same shopping experience as shopping through the regular Amazon site.
So far the JUS society president (“you” below) has accounted for more than half of the donations that were direct-deposited into the society’s bank account from Amazon Smile. Come on Updike fans and book lovers, we can do better!
Writer John Updike was such a commentator on American society that he’s often cited comparatively or as a cultural touchstone–especially at The New Yorker, where he was the Talk of the Town writer for many years and a frequent contributor of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews thereafter. The most recent comparison comes from Nikil Saval, who, in his essay on “The Impeccably Understated Modernism of I.M. Pei,” writes,
“In John Updike’s story ‘Gesturing,’ first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. ‘The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,’ Updike writes, ‘famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful.’ The architect had imagined that a sheer glass skin would ‘reflect the sky and the old low brick skyline of Boston’ and would ‘melt into the sky.’ ‘Instead,’ Updike continues, ‘the windows of mirroring glass kept falling to the street and were replaced by ugly opacities of black plywood.’ Still, enough of the reflective surface remains ‘to give an impression, through the wavery old window of this sudden apartment, of huge blueness, a vertical cousin to the horizontal huge blueness of the sea that Richard awoke to each morning, in the now bone-deep morning chill of his unheated shack.’ Not too surprisingly, the distressed tower becomes an oblique symbol for the state of Richard’s life, soul, and dissolved marriage, slicing in and out of the story, much as its counterpart slices in and out of the Boston skyline.
“The skyscraper in ‘Gesturing’ is unmistakably the John Hancock Tower (officially renamed 200 Clarendon in 2015), designed by I.M. Pei and finished in 1976,” writes Saval, adding that despite structural problems the building “remains the single most beautiful object in one of the world’s most tedious, stuffy cities—on one of Boston’s handful of pleasant blue days, it reflects and multiplies the scudding clouds.”
John Updike is no stranger to subscribers of the Library of America series, but this time he’s just one contributor out of many. For Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology, dance critic Mindy Aloff has assembled a collection of essays and other forms written by “dancers and dance creators, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers” to tell the story of dance in America “from tap and swing to ballet and modern dance, from Five Points to Radio City Music Hall, and from the Lindy Hop to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk.”
