Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection

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British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations. In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It’s a delicious counterpoint to Evans’s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples with influencing Ordinary People, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other’s fingertips?'”

New Yorker at 100 also celebrates editorial battles

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The New Yorker is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those New Yorker pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that Made The New Yorker.” John Updike Society’s Dave Lull culled the sections that deal with Updike:

1—”Early in Adam Gopnik’s stint as a New Yorker editor, he got a draft of a piece from John Updike. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:
Dear Adam,
The piece recently submitted was
a) deemed unacceptable,
b) in need of significant rewriting,
c) lost behind a radiator.
John
Updike—even Updike!—had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. ‘Was anything wrong with the Auden review?’ Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. ‘There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.’ He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. ‘I enclose a disk,’ Updike once wrote to Finder, ‘but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.’”
2—”White later wrote to Updike, ‘Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: ‘There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.’”
3—”There’s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers—sometimes for years—leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits.”
4—”In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: ‘Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.’”
5—”Updike never saw that pasture. ‘I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,’ he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. ‘They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.’ He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.”

‘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.”