Listed among entries in the “Literary Destinations” category, John Updike appears on the Literary America website, which lists the three Pennsylvania locales (Shillington/Olinger, Plowville/Firetown, and Reading/Brewer) associated with him. The website, which promotes the book A Journey Through Literary America, is a good one to browse through and ultimately use as inspiration for literary pilgrimages.
Michael Updike posted on Facebook that it was a “great morning installing Lucy Foster’s gravestone. This project was initiated by Dr. Linda Meditz and her students at the Academy of Penguin Hall. They found, researched Lucy and designed her stone. I had the honor of interpreting their design and carving it. Many of the design elements are from shards of pottery found during an archaeological dig of her home. The epitaph reads “Born into slavery in Boston ~ Came to her freedom in Andover ~ Known by God and her community.”
Writing for the Times Union (“Rabbit had quite the run”), Casey Seiler shares with readers his thoughts after reading Rabbit at Rest again. And his first paragraph summation of just a few of the topics Updike covers in the 1990 novel—Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, sexual misconduct, substance abuse, junk food—seem proof enough of the novel’s continued relevancy.
Seiler adds, “For Updike’s Rabbit, 1989 is a year of entropy in which his lifetime of unquenchable appetites presents him with a past-due bill. Reading it today, you get the strange sense that American life has slowed down in its own entropic way. Rabbit’s attitude toward women and racial minorities aren’t uniformly toxic, but they’re in no way woke—put him in a time machine and he’ll feel right at home on the average barstool in 2019. His feckless son grapples with a cocaine problem, but it could just as easily be opioids that help him escape his own early-midlife ennui. The sitcoms and politicians have different titles, but the push and pul among family, career, and the individual remain the same.
“For any reader who was alive and relatively adult [in 1989, the year the novel was set], the book is a remarkable catalog of life month-to-month, including everything from the aftermath of the Pan Am 107 bombing over Lockerbie to the opera buffa fall of televangelist Jim Bakker. As in the previous Rabbit books, Angstrom is a voracious consumer of the news, though his reflections on the meaning of daily events frequently spiral back to his own fascinations: that old standby sex, and the looming specter of his own mortality.
“All four books are written in the present tense, which adds wattage to the tiny electric charge delivered to the contemporary reader every time Updike mentions a cultural figure—like Trump or Oprah—who remain at or near the center of the national stage today. you feel like you’re in a time machine, which is of course what the best literature is.”
“There’s a certain comfort in this, of course: We tend to imagine that the present moment is either the summit or the pits, when in reality we occupy space that was previously occupied by some other striver, and will someday be taken up by another person trying to make it through the day and scrape up some grace. . . . The greatest thing separating Rabbit’s final months from today is the presence of the smartphone, which would no doubt have wrecked many of his most mesmerizing observations of the people and nature around our hero. The book contains some of the greatest descriptions of walks in American literature.”
Two papers on John Updike were presented at the Fourth International Conference on “National Myth in Literature and Culture” hosted by Kazan Federal University in Russia, May 6-7.
Professor Olga Karasik’s paper, “Russia through the Eyes of American Author: John Updike’s ‘Rich in Russia,'” focused on the mythologizing of the image of the Soviet Union, and Ph.D. student Olga Shalagina’s paper, “The Image of Terrorist in John Updike’s Terrorist,” was devoted to the image of the terrorist as “other.”
John Updike Society board member Robert Luscher is looking for Updike enthusiasts to participate in a panel at a September 5-7, 2019 symposium in New Orleans hosted by The Society for the Study of the American Short Story. Proposals are due by June 15, 2019. If interested, send a short abstract (100-200 words) on proposed topics to Robert Luscher (luscherr@unk) no later than June 7.
Further information on the conference, “The American Short Story: New Considerations” can be found in the official Call for Papers. The symposium will be held at the Hotel Monteleone, a historic 1886 hotel in the heart of the French Quarter located within a short walk of virtually all the literary locations. It’s one of the last great family-owned and operated hotels in New Orleans, now operated by a fifth generation. Some of the famous writers who stayed there include Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Anne Rice, Stephen Ambrose, and John Grisham.
David Heddendorf’s “Updike or Moses?” was published in the Lent 2019 issue of The Cresset: A review of literature, the arts, and public affairs, in which he writes,
“Updike and [Muriel] Spark professed their Christian faith openly, but spent most of their time, by all accounts, with other famous authors. They wrote for The New Yorker, went to swanky parties, enjoyed the pastimes their wealth and celebrity allowed. They squeezed church into the margins of their glamorous lives, when they went at all. They discussed Christianity in interviews, and sometimes dealt with theological issues in their books, but faith didn’t help determine their circle of acquaintance the way it does for me and many people I know. They soared high above the tacky music, the trite poetry, the innocently insulting questions.”
He quotes Updike (“I enjoyed the anti-bohemian gesture of my deadpan churchgoing,” with its “less than half-hearted” emotional involvement) and summarizes,
“Moses and Updike frame the dilemma I’ve confronted all my life—a dilemma I suspect many Christian artists and intellectuals share. We can fulfill, like Updike, the demands of our art or research, keeping among like-minded peers and neglecting the fellowship of believers. Or we can identify with the people of God, many of whom don’t understand or even respect what we [writers] do. Achievement and gratification apart from the Christian community, or an embrace of that community while living with the mediocrity and a kind of exile—is this the choice we face?”
In a reveiw published in The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis pronounced the new HBO adaptation “An Arty but Superficial Take on Native Son.”
She writes that the production, directed by Rashid Johnson with a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, “thankfully dispenses with some of the novel’s most graphic elements and moves its protagonist out of the 1930s and into contemporary Chicago. This Bigger, who more often goes by Big, is played by a graceful and dynamic Ashton Sanders (Moonlight). He skulks about the screen, and the South Side, in green hair and punkish attire: black high-water pants, black nail polish, a black leather jacket with OR AM I FREAKING OUT spray-painted across the back. Big’s got a lot of style. The same could be said for the film itself.”
However, Giorgis writes, “The film gestures at Big’s internal motivations, but doesn’t bear them out. Instead, we see him visibly uncomfortable in a soul-food joint with Mary (Margaret Qualley) and her white Communist boyfriend, Jan (Nick Robinson). We get classical-music interludes and shots of books, including Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in Big’s room. (In the shot that features the Ellison book, Big places a gun on it.) We see him admire the Daltons’ library, and the camera lingers for a moment on the volumes—among them, John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, and, naturally, Richard Wright’s Native Son. These signifiers function primarily as shortcuts for suggesting that Bigger is a different sort of black man without offering any context for why the norm itself exists.”
Related story: “Native Son Gets the James Baldwin Edit”
Writing for Broadway Direct, Mark A. Robinson compiled a list of “West End Musicals We Hope Will Come to Broadway,” and had this to say about an Updike-based production:
The Witches of Eastwick—This one goes back even further than We Will Rock You, opening in the West End in 2000. The Witches of Eastwick premiered to generally good reviews and enjoyed a 15-month run, but never found its way to the Broadway stage. Dana P. Rowe provided the music and John Dempsey the book and lyrics, adapting the popular John Updike novel of the same name (and its subsequent film) to tell the story of three witches who are all in a relationship with the same devilish man. Only when they bring their powers together can they teach him the lesson he deserves. Below is a photo of the gossippy wives from the production.
The “Book Marks” website celebrated what would have been John Updike’s 87th birthday with a list of early reviews to the “Rabbit” novels for which the author is most famous. Here are a few of them:
“Rabbit, Run is a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst. A modest work, it points to a talent of large dimensions—already prove in the author’s New Yorker stories and his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike, still only 28 years old, is a man to watch.”
–David Boroff, The New York Times, November 6, 1960
“There is a great deal in Rabbit Redux, but only because John Updike has put it there. There is more activity than purposefulness: an intricate scheme of parallelisms with the moon shot; a rich (but in the end funked or slighted) sense of possible parallels between oral sex and verbalism or certain verbal habits; likewise a sense of parallels between the job of linotyping and the job of writing. The book is cleverer than a barrel full of monkeys, and about as odd in its relation of form to content. It never decides just what the artistic reasons (sales and nostalgia are another matter) were for bringing back Rabbit instead of starting anew; its existence is likely to do retrospective damage to that better book Rabbit, Run.”
–Christopher Ricks, The New York Review of Books, December 16, 1971
“If Rabbit Is Rich has a central theme it has to do with the one-directional nature of life: life, always waiting to be death. Rabbit swans on down the long slide, clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.
“The technical problem posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit’s pitiable constriction. Conversely, the empty corners and hollow spaces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.”
–Martin Amis, The Observer, January 17, 1982
“Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike’s longer novels. Its courageous theme—the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all carry inside us—is struck in the first sentence … This early note, so emphatically struck, reverberates through the length of the novel and invests its domestic-crisis story with an unusual pathos. For where in previous novels, most famously in Couples (1968), John Updike explored the human body as Eros, he now explores the body, in yet more detail, as Thanatos. One begins virtually to share, with the doomed Harry Angstrom, a panicky sense of the body’s terrible finitude, and of its place in a world of other, competing bodies: ‘You fill a slot for a time and then move out; that’s the decent thing to do: make room.’”
–Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times, September 30, 1990
“The centerpiece of [Licks of Love]—and the one compelling reason to read it—is a novella-length piece called ‘Rabbit Remembered,’ a sad-funny postscript to Mr. Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels, which takes up the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s family and friends as they try to come to terms with his death and chart the remainder of their own lives.
“As in his last Rabbit novel, Mr. Updike writes with fluent access to Harry Angstrom’s world, chronicling the developments in his hero’s small Pennsylvania hometown with the casual ease of a longtime intimate. With compassion and bemused affection, he traces the many large and small ways in which Harry’s actions continue to reverberate through the lives of his widow, Janice, and their son, Nelson, and the equally myriad ways in which their decisions are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by their memories of him.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission announced yesterday afternoon that The John Updike Childhood Home was one of 18 new historical markers approved out of 55 nominees. The other high-profile approval was musician Jim Croce’s home.
John Updike, who lived in the house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue until he was 13 (1932-45), received the 1983 Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist Award from the governor in a Harrisburg ceremony. Updike wrote often about the house, Shillington, Reading, and the surrounding area, and was honored by presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush in White House ceremonies.
This article from the NBC Philadelphia affiliate gets the county wrong—Shillington is in Berks, not Bucks County—but it’s a fact that soon there will be a state-approved marker placed outside The John Updike Childhood Home. The property is owned by The John Updike Society and will be operated as a museum and literary landmark. A grand opening for the house-museum is scheduled for October 3, 2020. While the restoration is complete, what remains is to decide on which items would make for informative and satisfying displays, and to mouth those permanent exhibits.
Updike’s Pennsylvania-inspired fictions include The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, Of the Farm, Pigeon Feathers, Olinger Stories, and the Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest). The approval of the historic marker comes near the 10th anniversary of The John Updike Society’s founding in May 2009.
The society’s application for inclusion on the National Historic Register is separate, and is now with the National Park Service, who will make their determination sometime between now and the beginning of May.
See also “John Updike historical marker among 18 approved by state” (Reading Eagle)