John Updike the Blogger?

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On the blog First Things, Stephen H. Webb considers Adam Begley’s biography and charges, “Begley portrays Updike as a man who could not stop writing and as a writer who could not stop thinking about himself. For Begley, in fact, Updike comes across as America’s first (and finest) blogger.”

But he adds, “Begley does not get to the heart of the man because he does not grasp the soul of his faith.”

Moreover, Webb writes, “Without getting to the heart of what he most cherished in his personal experiences, Begley’s Updike comes off as a grandiloquent and compulsive chronicler of his own thoughts and actions.”

Webb adds, “That the meager theological fare of liberal Protestantism was still enough to prompt people like himself to gather regularly just to say thank you to God was perverse evidence for Updike that the modern world still left room for miracles. In fact, gratitude was so important to him that I would call it the sum of both his piety and his art, and I don’t know how anyone can read his work in this era of resentment and entitlement without feeling grateful for him.”

“John Updike the Blogger”

Golf Digest Updike article resurfaces

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Screen Shot 2014-08-01 at 1.15.17 PMClick on Victor Bond’s Golf Dream blog and you’ll discover that the most recent post is “John Updike, Golfer” by David Owen, which begins, “If golfers were allowed to vote for the Nobel Prize in literature, John Updike would have won it in 1991, when The New Yorker published his short story ‘Farrell’s Caddie.'” The article-remembrance originally appeared in the April 2008 Golf Digest.

Here’s the link.

Updike makes a 10 Worst list

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Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 11.36.32 AMJohn Updike has made another list, but this time it’s a worst, rather than a best list.

His piece on “A Desert Encounter” was rated #5 on “The 10 Worst New Yorker #Longreads.” 

5. “A Desert Encounter,” John Updike

The New Yorker is a magazine for writers, writerly writers of wonderful words. These writers write with pens, using their hands to move the pens and their brains to control what their hands and thus the pens do. They are the Great Chroniclers of Life and Letters. Their names will hang weighty on the pages of the New Yorker long after they are buried beneath this dusky earth of ours, as long as there is anything article-shaped of theirs left to publish. Thus this twilight dispatch from John Updike, in which the literary colossus loses his hat.

“My sense of triumph when my wife and I agreed that the job had been completed was marred by a mysterious circumstance: my hat had disappeared.”

Updike fans can take some comfort in the fact that one of the author’s more vocal critics, Jonathan Franzen, placed #2 on the list with “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.” 

Letter writer comments on Updike’s autobiographical novels

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Financial Review (Australia) published a letter to the editor on July 18 in response to a July 11 review of Adam Begley’s Updike:

John Updike in good company

John Updike joins a long line of celebrated authors who have written novels thinly based on their personal relationships with others (“A life well read”, Review, July 11).

The much-travelled Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene developed fictional characters partly drawn from their accommodating hosts and thus easily recognisable in small towns in remote and exotic locations. However, it would be hard to beat one of the lurid plotlines in Edmund Schiddell’s The Devil in Bucks County. The embarrassed people of Doylestown have never forgiven Schiddell for that public indiscretion. Updike also scandalised his native Pennsylvania.

There must be something weird in the water in that state.

Mike Fogarty
Weston, ACT

Inquirer moves Toward a better list of great Pennsylvanians

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Screen Shot 2014-07-23 at 6.56.36 AMKaren Heller, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, posted a piece titled “Send us your nominees for great Pennsylvanians” in response to a Harper poll that placed Ben Franklin at the top of the list, followed by Bill Cosby.

“The list goes downhill from there,” Heller writes, adding that Cosby is “the sole choice who isn’t long dead.

“But Pennsylvania has offered the country so much since the time of Penn and Ben. In the arts, we have Thomas Eakins, Andy Warhol, Mary Cassatt, Frank Furness, James Stewart, Will Smith, three Barrymores, and two splendid Kellys, Gene and Grace.

“In music, Pennsylvania produced Marian Anderson, Oscar Hammerstein, John Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Stan Getz, Sun Ra, Hall and Oates, Gamble and Huff, Pink and Taylor Swift. The state produces terrific writers: John Updike, August Wilson, John O’Hara, muckraking Ida Tarbell, Rachel Carson, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mead. The commonwealth can do funny: W.C. Fields, Tina Fey, and the tonsorially challenged third of the Stooges, Larry Fine.”

She asked readers to move “Toward a better list of great Pennsylvanians.”

Blogger explains his ambivalence toward Updike

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Robert M. Detman, who maintains a blog on The Literary, recently explored what could only be termed his ambivalence toward John Updike and his writing in a post titled “The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction.”

“In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life,” he writes. “I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

“What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience—admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.”

Of course, Updike isn’t the first major author to write highly autobiographical fiction. Ernest Hemingway quickly comes to mind, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Angstrom makes a Best Fictional Characters list

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Screen Shot 2014-07-19 at 7.23.16 AMThe Independent asked 100 “leading figures of British literature to name the characters who give them the most reading pleasure.”

Author and critic John Sutherland (A Little History of Literature) picked Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom, the serial hero of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, is the only protagonist I’ve grown old with—doomed, but indomitable and lovable,” he writes.

If you’re wondering what other American literary fictional characters made the list, Rhett Butler (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind) was chosen, as was Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed hero Dick Diver (Tender Is the Night), Humbert Humbert (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita), Patrick Bateman (Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho), and Herman Melville’s white whale (Moby-Dick).

Two of Philip Roth’s characters (Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath) made the list, but Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 scored the most, with literary figures choosing three characters from that comic war novel: Yossarian, Dunbar, and Milo.

“Best fictional characters from Sherlock Holmes to Jane Eyre as chosen by 100 literary figures”

Blogger reviews The Lovely Troubled Daughters

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Today Whispering Gums, a blog devoted to books and such, posted a review of John Updike’s short story, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd.”

“I love the complexity of this,” the blogger writes, “the fact that Updike has chosen to tell this story through decidedly subjective eyes, and yet has managed to leave the interpretation surprisingly open. It’s a story, I suspect, that can be read very differently depending on each reader’s experience and point of view, despite some givens in the text.”

“John Updike, The lovely troubled daughters of our old crowd (Review)”

 

Raghupati Bhatt on John Updike’s Indian Connection

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Raghupati Bhatt’s essay on “John Updike’s Indian Connection” appeared in Vol. 4, No. 7 (July 2014) of The International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications. In writing about S., Bhatt concludes, “It becomes very clear after reading the novel that the author has made a careful study of some books on Yoga and oriental mythology.”

“And what follows is fit to be in any porno book. It is not meant to. The description is fitting to the part of the story. Updike goes on giving such things because his themes are related to them. Why does S give description? She and through her Updike wants to point out the difference between her past and present.

“The difference between her husband’s lovemaking and Arhat’s is that Arhat’s Lovemaking makes him an equal partner. His is a religious affair. His constant talking and quoting Sanskrit texts gives her a sense of satisfaction calling her his eternal shakti gives her a feeling of elevation. Her husband loved her as his wife but Arhat loved her as ‘Vishesha Rati’ or as an extraordinary female.'”

Here is the full text.

David Updike to speak at conference plenary session

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Screen Shot 2014-07-14 at 7.44.43 PMThe John Updike Society has appreciated the involvement of Updike family members, with the first conference featuring a panel consisting of Mary, Updike’s first wife, and three of the four Updike siblings—Liz, Michael, and Miranda. And the second conference in Boston offered a special exhibit mounted by Michael, with Liz helping him to discuss the objects their father mentioned in his fiction and prose. For the upcoming Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, David Updike will offer a plenary session.

David, a writer whose most recent collection of short stories is titled Old Girlfriends, will speak on “Family Archaeology: pictures, objects, words.” He is currently the Updike Scholar in Residence at Alvernia University.

Members (and new members) can still register for the conference (3rd Conference registration form) and still submit an abstract for a paper presentation: Call for Papers extended.

The conference, hosted by Alvernia University, features additional plenary sessions by Don Greiner on the “Chatterbox and the Young JU,” Ward Briggs and Biljana Dojcinovic on the real romance that inspired Updike’s “The Bulgarian Poetess,” and a panel of Updike classmates interviewed by Jack De Bellis (John Updike’s Early Years).

The two keynote speakers should be equally memorable. Legendary graphic artist Chip Kidd, who designed many an Updike cover and worked closely with the author, will deliver the opening keynote speech on Thursday, October 2. And Adam Begley, whose biography of Updike has been widely acclaimed, will deliver the closing keynote speech at the Saturday evening banquet at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel, a historic building at which many famous people have stayed, and where composer John Philip Sousa famously died while on tour.

Speaking of tours, there are two planned: One is a walking tour of Updike’s Shillington and a picnic at The John Updike Childhood Home, where you can see how the restoration is coming along; the other is a local flavor bus tour that will drive past historic covered bridges and hex barns, tour a small local pretzel factory, and stop at such Updike sites as Plow Cemetery and the Pagoda. If you went on the bus tour for the first conference, you’ll still want to come along, because there are new things mixed in with the old.

New members and first-time attendees are most welcome! And members who attended one of the first conferences know that these start to feel like reunions, where you can gather with like-minded friends. You’ll have plenty of opportunities for that, including a welcoming reception hosted by Alvernia University, and a tour of the Reading Public Museum and reception hosted by Albright College.