‘Hamlet’ essayist includes discussion of Updike’s ‘Gertrude and Claudius’

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ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS, by Slovoj Žižek, posted a fascinating essay on Hamlet:  “When God Cries: Hamlet and the Art of World-Shattering change” earlier this year, using John Updike’s prequel to Shakespeare’s famous tragedy to further his argument.

“There are thus good arguments for the premise of John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius that Hamlet’s father is the truly evil person in the play, and that his injunction to Hamlet is an obscenity. Updike’s novel is a prequel to Shakespeare’s play: Gertrude and Claudius are engaged in an adulterous affair (Shakespeare is ambiguous on this point), and this affair is presented as passionate true love. Gertrude is a sensual, somewhat neglected wife, Claudius a rather dashing fellow, and old Hamlet an unpleasant combination of brutal Viking raider and coldly ambitious politician. Claudius has to kill the old Hamlet because he learns that the old king plans to kill them both (and he does it without Gertrude’s knowledge or encouragement). Claudius turns out to be a good, generous king; he lives and reigns happily with Gertrude, and everything runs smoothly until Hamlet returns from Wittenberg and throws everything out of joint. Whatever we imagine as the (fictional) reality of Hamlet, Gertrude is the only kindhearted and basically honest person in the play.”

The Biblio File retro-reminds of Updike ‘Just Looking’

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Nigel Beale, of The Biblio File podcast, posted an entry a while back reminding followers that “Updike the essayist is always worth reading.” It’s the Jan. 1990 issue of Art & Antiques, in which an interview showcases Updike’s response to a photo from Life magazine of a young woman dancing to celebrate Hawaii’s statehood.

Asked what struck him about the photo enough to write about it, Updike responded, “The word Wahine, for one thing—proving that captions matter. “The young woman’s beauty, for another—her svelte midriff, her exposed navel, her perfect teeth, her cluster of earrings, her fishnet stockings with their hint of whorishness. The expression on her face, between glee and agony. The sea of faces behind her. Her curious aloneness in front of that sea, facing the other way, on what appears to be an otherwise deserted stage. Is she one of a chorus line? Whence comes the music she is swaying to, the rhythmic impetus hoisting one dainty heel up from its slipper and swirling the threads of her skirt and her bra? What force has all but shut her eyes? The camera has caught a Dionysian mystery; it has caught ecstasy.”

Updike’s full rumination on this particular artwork and others can be found in Just Looking, the first of three volumes of his art criticism.

Look for Updike in special century New Yorker collections

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For this entry we need to thank writer Sherman Alexie for calling it to our attention. Alexie gleefully (and deservedly so) posted, “There are only three writers who have work in both A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker [edited by Kevin Young] and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker [edited by Deborah Treisman]: John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and me.” Alexie adds, “All I can do is laugh at how impossible this feels! It’s such a long cultural and economic journey for the reservation Indian boy that I was.” Congratulations, Mr. Alexie! The honor is much deserved.

 

Updike’s 1954 poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums” made the cut for the poetry volume, while his 1991 story “The Other Side of the Street” earned a place in the fiction volume. In the latter, a man returns to the small Pennsylvania town of his childhood to clean out his mother’s home and claim a few of her possessions. Both books are available from your favorite bookstores and retailers.

WJS list of five best books on fame includes Updike

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In an April 4, 2025 post for The Wall Street Journal, Craig Brown (Q: A Voyage Around the Queen) revealed his choice for the five best books to tackle the subject of fame. Topping the list was David Kinney’s The Dylanologists, part-confession and part-reporting on Bob Dylan superfans and their antics, “a sharp and often hilarious book about the madness of fame and fandom.”

Coming in at #2 was Donald Sassoon’s Becoming Mona Lisa, which traces the path to superstardom of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous subject/painting—a study that Brown said “suggests that, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, posterity is a peculiarly fickle thing.”

Number 3 on the list is John Updike’s The Complete Henry Bech:  “John Updike’s recurring character Henry Bech is the author of ‘one good book and three others, the good one having come first.’ Bech’s reputation increases as his output declines, and he spends his time giving speeches, accepting awards, signing books and appearing on television. ‘The appetite for serious writing is almost entirely dead, alas, but the appetite for talking, walking authors rages in the land,’ Updike once said, in an ‘interview’ with who else but Bech, his lazy, Jewish alter-ego. Collected here in The Complete Henry Bech, Updike’s satirical vignettes on the absurd distractions offered by literary fame grow more accurate with each passing year.”

Rounding out the list were Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, a work of historical fiction from the Charles Dickens and P.T. Barnum era, and Pat Hackett’s The Andy Warhol Diaries, an edited collection of 1000+ entries that makes it “shamefully hard to stop” reading.

Five Best: Books on Fame

Are the days of males writing about fictionalized divorce angst over?

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Helen Brown, writing for The Telegraph, explained “Why men can’t write about divorce any more”: as Lyz Lenz summarized, “there is an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface.”

“Fifty years ago, it was men who dominated the divorce genre, often pouring their own domestic woes in novelistic form as an act of retribution. John Updike wrote 18 short stories about a fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple (later collected and published as The Maple Stories) who divorced in mid-life. . . . Philip Roth (who died in 2018) was famously accused ofpillorying his second wife, British actress Claire Bloom in his fiction.”

Read the whole article.

Winter 2024 John Updike Review is published

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It’s not exactly a doorstop, but at 186 pages, the Vol. 11 No. 1 (Winter 2024) issue of The John Updike Review is the largest to date. From the striking cover—a full-color photo of Updike with his father in a candid moment—to end pages that feature opportunities for writers and scholars, this issue has a lot to offer.

Featured is a section on “The Centaur at Sixty,” with essays from editor James Schiff, David Updike, and Updike scholars Sylvie Mathé, D. Quentin Miller, Matthew Shipe, Biljana Dojčinović, and Peter J. Bailey that occupy 130 pages. Also included in the “three writers” series are essays from Robert Morace, Adam Reid Sexton, and Olga Karasik-Updike on The Witches of Eastwick film, plus an essay by Bailey on The Afterlife and Other Stories and an essay from the most recent winner of the John Updike Review Emerging Writer’s Prize: “‘Bech Lied’: The (Un)Comfortable Idea of the Self in John Updike’s Bech: A Book,” by Joseph Ozias.

Rounding out the issue is a “Letter from Tucson: The Shimmering Grid,” from Sue Norton, the first recipient of the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship. Congratulations to Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason on another exceptional issue. Physical copies of The John Updike Review are sent to society members in the U.S., with digital copies sent to other members except by arrangement. Information on joining the society can be found here. Institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO.

UNLV Library points students toward Updike

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The University of Nevada—Las Vegas main library has begun a series of online posts to promote reading and discovery of authors and books in the library, beginning with John Updike.

“Lied’s Reads: John Updike,” by Alberto Lorio, began by saying “Everyone wants to stumble onto something interesting. . . . For UNLV students of an intellectual kind of faith, Lied Library graciously rewards those looking to wander. Though there are many deserving places for a wanderer to begin stumbling, the first of Lied’s great reads highlighted here will be the work of American author John Updike. Writer George Saunders described Updike as ‘a once-in-a-generation phenomenon if that generation is lucky.”

“Updike was distinctly humanistic in his writing, exploring aspects of personal and social life in mid-century America. To him, writing was a sort of catharsis of the soul, one which came as spiritual release. It was a means of expression endemic to his meticulous observation: of individuals, of society, and of himself. . . .”

“John Updike’s legacy remains that of a poetic, class-conscious, sociological sentimentalist. His writing is sincere in its exploration—of the unifying, timeless eccentricity of being; of navigation in the labyrinthian strangeness inherent to our American lives.

“Students hoping to stumble into John Updike should look to wander in the American Literature section of the fifth floor of Lied Library.”

WSJ: Updike’s Rabbit provides a life lesson

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Writing on “Five Best: Life Lessons” for The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Wilkinson, author of Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire, shared five of the best life lessons he found in fiction. The first entry, from John Updike, came from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Is Rich (1981):

“The third installment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series finds Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom finally comfortable—or at least financially secure—amid the tumultuous backdrop of 1979’s oil crisis and stagflation. ‘How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?’ the narrator observes, capturing the novel’s eerie contemporary resonance: interest rates and real-estate climbing skyward—and staying there—and a gnawing certainty that the next generation won’t have it quite so good. Updike’s prose transforms the mundane rhythms of middle-class life into something approaching poetry as he excavates middle-class anxiety and success. Rabbit’s car dealership is printing money thanks to the Japanese vehicles he sells, even as his own prejudices and racial anxieties bubble beneath the surface. His son Nelson is adrift, the world seems to be coming apart at the seams and Rabbit’s own biases reflect the tensions of a changing America. The novel won Updike both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for its devastating precision in capturing what it means to ‘make it’ while watching the ladder get pulled up behind you.”

New Yorker at 100 revisits Updike’s ‘Hub Fans’

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The New Yorker celebrates its centennial in 2025 and the literary party is going on all year long. On March 9, Louisa Thomas wrote about the significance of John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which a subhead noted was “described as the best piece about baseball The New Yorker ever printed.”

Thomas wrote, “On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, ‘falling in love, away from marriage,’ took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base.
He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. ‘It was in the books while it was still in the sky,’ Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. Updike captured not only the ball’s trajectory and its monumental effect but also the moment’s mix of jubilation and relief.”
Thomas added that “it was Updike’s insight to see that everyone had expected [the last-bat home run], and in fact it was that shared expectation that held them in their seats. . . . So much of the best sportswriting since then bears the hallmarks of Updike’s example: an elegant, natural tone; precise, surprising descriptions; pacing that neither impedes the drama nor does too much to drive it.”