{"id":2493,"date":"2014-09-24T07:29:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T12:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=2493"},"modified":"2014-09-24T08:18:33","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T13:18:33","slug":"olinger-stories-republished-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2014\/09\/24\/olinger-stories-republished-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"Olinger Stories republished, reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>Apart from the poem \u201cEx-Basketball Player\u201d and short stories like \u201cA&P,\u201d Updike isn\u2019t taught much in American high schools because of the language and sexual content that\u2019s sprinkled liberally throughout his Rabbit series and other classics. But that may change with the republication of Olinger Stories<\/em> by Everyman\u2019s Pocket Classics<\/strong>, which will be released on October 7, 2014.<\/p>\n

Ironically, we received a review copy smack in in the middle of Banned Books Week, and the handsome, bargain-priced ($16 SRP) hardcover with Updike\u2019s hand-picked stories gives high school teachers a classroom-worthy book\u2014one that Updike himself considered \u201chis signature collection, the volume of short stories that communicated his freshest impressions of life as it came to him in hardscrabble Berks County, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s and \u201840s,\u201d as a publisher\u2019s note reminds us. Updike once told an interviewer, \u201cIf I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

There’s a delightful world of language, of place, and of finding one’s place in the world to discover for readers new to Updike. But this new volume may work for scholars as well, because, as the publisher\u2019s note continues, the \u201ctext of the stories reprinted here are those that Updike published in The Early Stories<\/em>, which he deemed definitive,\u201d along with a foreword to the original 1964 Vintage paperback \u201caltered only to incorporate a few small changes made by the author after its initial publication.\u201d<\/p>\n

Included, in order, are the stories \u201cYou\u2019ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You,\u201d \u201cThe Alligators\u201d (which is already being taught in some high schools), \u201cPigeon Feathers\u201d (also being taught), \u201cFriends from Philadelphia,\u201d \u201cA Sense of Shelter,\u201d \u201cFlight,\u201d \u201cThe Happiest I\u2019ve Been,\u201d \u201cThe Persistence of Desire,\u201d \u201cThe Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother\u2019s Thimble, and Fanning Island,\u201d \u201cPacked Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,\u201d and \u201cIn Football Season.\u201d Right now, Amazon.com<\/a> is selling the collection for $10.12. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Olinger, of course, is Shillington, and anyone who\u2019s recently read Jack De Bellis\u2019s John Updike\u2019s Early Years<\/em> or the new Adam Begley biography, Updike<\/em>, will recognize a number of passages that could pass for non-fiction, if the names hadn\u2019t been altered.<\/p>\n

In \u201cFlight,\u201d for example, knowledgeable readers will be reminded of Updike\u2019s own living situation. He and his parents moved in with his maternal grandparents, who bought the Shillington house now owned by the Updike Society as a city house and never thought to sell the Plowville farm until the stock market crashed: \u201cLaboring in the soil had never been congenial to my grandfather, though with his wife\u2019s help he prospered by it. Then, in an era when success was hard to avoid, he began to invest in stocks. In 1922 he bought our large white home in the town\u2014its fashionable section had not yet shifted to the Shale Hill side of the valley\u2014and settled in to reap his dividends. He believed to his death that women were foolish, and the broken hearts of his two [Updike\u2019s mother and maternal grandmother] must have seemed specially so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Updike turns a phrase the way a woodworker turns a lathe, offering more details with every revolution:\u00a0\u201cFriday was his holiday, and he drank. His drinking is impossible for me to picture, for I never knew him except as an enduring, didactic, almost Biblical old man, whose one passion was reading the newspapers and whose one hatred was of the Republican party.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the stories there are details about the house, the neighborhood, the family members, and the hardships that were a part of Updike\u2019s childhood. The stories are equally rich in ideas and emotions, the things that students depend upon for class discussion. And the stories come packaged in a richly bound edition with sewed-in bookmark and slick, full-color dust jacket.<\/p>\n

Olinger Stories<\/em> is a handsome little volume that presents the best of Updike and Updike\u2019s Pennsylvania\u2014a more wholesome, more introspective companion to the Rabbit quartet, or poetic books like The Centaur<\/em> and Of the Farm<\/em>. This new collection reinforces, for a new generation of readers, how much this little corner of the world meant to Updike, and how important those first 18 years can be for a writer.<\/p>\n

reviewed by James Plath<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apart from the poem \u201cEx-Basketball Player\u201d and short stories like \u201cA&P,\u201d Updike isn\u2019t taught much in American high schools because of the language and sexual content that\u2019s sprinkled liberally throughout his Rabbit series and other classics. But that may change … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2499,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/2499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}