First Person Singular focuses on a January 14 blog post by Jon Busch titled “Getting Over Updike,” which begins,

“John Updike was a living legend around Gordon College. He lived mere miles from our tiny campus, and swapping tales of ‘Updike sightings’ was a common pastime among English majors.”

Updike “encounters” were apparently just as common, and Busch shares several humorous anecdotes, along with his somewhat embarrassed reaction to A Month of Sundays.

He writes, “Regardless of the absurdity and vulgarity of A Month of Sundays, I do wish we Gordonites had not irrevocably offended Updike all those years ago. His ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’ alone is adequate atonement for a lifetime of bad sex writing.”

Gordon College is a Christian school in Wenham, Massachusetts. “Legend has it (and I have no way to verify this) that an intrepid English professor in the late seventies or early eighties struck up a friendship with Updike and asked him to come speak on campus. Updike accepted the invitation, but had to be ‘disinvited’ when the president of the college famously declared, ‘I don’t want that pornographer anywhere near our campus.

“Decades later, an Updike convocation was still off the table. Apparently, the man knew how to hold a grudge. We English majors held a grudge as well, against that ignorant, foolish president who damned us to an Updike-less, and thus incomplete, education.”

It was only after reading A Month of Sundays many years later that Busch says he developed “sympathy for the old president’s position.”

The late David Foster Wallace, who famously attacked Updike and other literary Johns, is featured in The David Foster Wallace Reader and the subject of a Newsweek cover story by Alexander Nazaryan.

For any fan of Updike who’s more familiar with Wallace’s sniping than with Wallace and his fiction, “The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace” provides a good summary of the career of the author of Infinite Jest, who killed himself in 2008.

In it, Updike is mentioned . . . of course, pejoratively.

In a Commonweal article inspired by Adam Begley’s recent biography, Rand Richards Cooper considers “The Charms of the Conqueror: How John Updike Made It Look Easy.”

“His writing flickers with the hope that the world was created, and thus merits the devotion of attention (by fictional characters) and description (by Updike himself),” he writes.

“The Rabbit novels are crammed with the trivia of American life down the decades, and their accumulating excess reminds us that far from being ‘untroubled,’ Updike wrote from a condition of spiritual urgency.”

“Having read Begley’s book, I shouldn’t be surprised that Updike wrote to the very end; still, I find myself awed by the courage it must have taken to sit in the fearful presence of death and write . . . a sonnet?”

Cooper concludes, “After someone we love dies, his or her voice stays with us, fresh and close, for years; we keep expecting the phone to ring with that voice on the other end; we experience frank disbelief, and renewed sorrow, at the idea that its owner truly is gone forever. It’s not much different with a writer one has loved. Keep company with a writer, in many books over decades of your life, and you grow accustomed to his presence; you hear his voice in much the same way you hear a friend’s or a sibling’s. Updike in his early years imitated other writers’ styles, channeling first Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and later Salinger and Nabokov—praising them by imitating their voices before eventually settling in to play his own exquisitely tuned instrument. Reading his prose in this life-and-art-affirming biography, I hear him vivid as ever, and miss him all over again.”