The Telegraph today paid a 100th birthday tribute to “Saul Bellow: ‘American writer supreme.'”
The story is a round-up of comments culled from remarks that writers and critics have made about Bellow over the years, including John Updike:
“Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist.”
Updike scholars and fans can now access a critical essay on Couples that was published in The International Fiction Review 23 (1996):
“Fire, Rain, Rooster: John Updike’s Christian Allegory in Couples,” by Sukhbir Singh, University of Chicago, begins,
“Most critics deal with John Updike’s Couples (1969) as a book about ‘sex,’ and ‘adultery.’ They invariably argue that in Couples, Updike advocates promiscuity as an antidote to the prevalent climate of nihilism, and he thereby repudiates a cardinal dictum of Christianity: ‘Though Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’ These commentators pay scant attention to Updike’s view of the supernatural and miss his allegorical motif in the novel. Contrary to their assertions, I will argue that Couples is a novel of spiritual awakening, taking into account the symbolic significance of the burning church in the text, and that in his novels Updike upholds the Christian belief in the presence of God and the piety of love, sex, and marriage.”
Michelle Kinsey Bruns has started a Flickr group page devoted to “John Updike: In Memory” for the purpose of discussion and photo-sharing.
She writes, “I noticed that many John Updike fans are posting photos of their Updike book collections today—the day after the great author’s death. There are some wonderful tributes out there on Flickr (I find the photos of overseas editions of Updike’s books especially fascinating!), but there was no group in which to collect them all. So I created one. Please contribute your Updike-related photos here, for the enjoyment of all of us who loved his work.”
Her first post is titled “In Reading, Pa., Memories and Monuments…”
The general membership elected Matthew Shipe to fill the open seat vacated when Jack De Bellis stepped down. Shipe begins a three-year term, starting immediately.
Shipe recently won the Emerging Writers Prize given by The John Updike Review, and he has been a member of the society since 2010. A lecturer and coordinator of Advanced Writing at Washington University in St. Louis, he wrote his dissertation on John Updike’s collected short fiction, and his work has appeared in The John Updike Review, Philip Roth Studies, Critical Insights: Raymond Carver (Salem Press, 2013), Roth and Celebrity (Lexington Books, 2013), and Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
John Updike Society members may know Andrew Moorhouse from the last two conferences he attended, at which he modestly suggested he was not an academic but “only” an Updike fan, a reader, and a lover of books.
But it turns out that his love of books has made him one of the most respected fine press publishers in the United Kingdom. And John Updike inspired him.
“The American author John Updike said: ‘A book is beautiful in its relation to the human eye, to the human hand, to the human brain and to the human spirit,’ and it is this quote which encouraged me to get involved in Fine Press publishing,” Moorhouse wrote in an article that appeared yesterday in The Irish Times: “Michael Longley’s Sea Asters: publishing as a work of art.”
In the article, Moorhouse talks about how he started Fine Press Poetry in 2013 and how his first three books—two featuring British poet Simon Armitage and this third release, Michael Longley’s Sea Asters, illustrated by the author’s artist daughter—came to be. The article also contains several poems by Longley, who was recently announced as winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
Moorhouse’s forthcoming publication is Andrew Motion’s Ted Hughes Award-winning Coming Home poems. Fine Press Poetry, which specializes in creating letterpress editions of poems accompanied by illustrations by wood engravers and artists, is based in Rochdale, England.
Stephen King, the master of horror who debuted with Carrie (1974), has turned to the newspaper headlines and a trio of literary masters for the subject of his new book. Finders Keepers is about a psychopath’s obsession with writer John Rothstein (a mash-up of John Updike, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger), whose “fame comes from his Runner books, a trilogy that tips its hat to Updike’s Rabbit novels,” says Guardian writer James Smythe.
Watch your mailboxes, John Updike Society members. Volume 3, Number 2 (Winter 2015) of The John Updike Review has been published and mailed. The issue features a stunning cover photo by Ara Guler and two plenary talks from the Third Biennial Conference: “The Bulgarian Poetess: John and Blaga,” by Ward Briggs and Biljana Dojčinović, and “Starting Out at Chatterbox: The Apprenticeship of John Updike,” by Donald J. Greiner. Also in this issue is the winning essay from the JUR’s Second Emerging Writers Prize—”The Long Goodbye: The Role of Memory in John Updike’s Late Short Fiction,” by Matthew Shipe—and “Engendering Pleasure: Sringara Rasa in John Updike’s S.,” by Pradipta Sengupta.
Editor James Schiff has done another fantastic job, and his innovative Three Writers feature, in which three invited writers are asked to contribute an essay on the same Updike story, novel, poem or essay, this issue spotlights the short story “Gesturing”: Robert M. Luscher’s “Motions of Meaning: John Updike’s ‘Gesturing,'” Dario Sulzman’s “‘I Feel I’ve Given Birth to a Black Hole’: Existential Motifs of Bachelorhood in John Updike’s ‘Gesturing,'” and Kathleen Verduin’s “Gestures of Reflection.”
Rounding out the issue is Matthew Shipe’s review of Bob Batchelor’s John Updike: A Critical Biography.
The John Updike Review is published twice a year by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati Department of English and Comparative Literature. To subscribe to The John Updike Review, simply join The John Updike Society (https://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/). Membership ($25 regular, $20 grad students/retirees) includes a subscription to the journal. Institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO.
WGBH-Boston has announced “Reading Hearts: The BPR Summer Book Club,” a three-month, no boundaries, interactive book club hosted by Alex Beam. In other words, you can read along, and listen in on the conversation with callers about each of the books, if you don’t feel like calling in yourself.
The June entry is Barefoot, by Elin Hilderbrand. For July, readers are asked to tackle Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and the communal read for August is Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond between People and Dogs, by Caroline Knapp.
The article quotes Amazon.com in summarizing Rabbit, Run as the July entry:
“Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.”
Michael Updike writes, “I received a cold call from an admirer of my father’s tonight. She had hoped to read this poem to my father but his demise put an end to that. So reading it to me was the bridesmaid’s option.” Mathilde Duffy is an artist who works and teaches art classes in the greater Boston area.
