{"id":7061,"date":"2026-07-14T09:21:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T14:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=7061"},"modified":"2026-07-14T09:21:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T14:21:34","slug":"rabbit-and-updike-reconsidered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2026\/07\/14\/rabbit-and-updike-reconsidered\/","title":{"rendered":"Rabbit (and Updike) Reconsidered"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The October 2025 publication of Selected Letters of John Updike<\/em> has occasioned numerous reviews and reactions, but for Kazuo Robinson and The Metropolitan Review<\/em><\/a> it has sparked more of a series of ruminations on Updike and his works. Insights from the letters lead to more insights.<\/p>\n

“Writing to Plowville from amidst exams in drama since Ibsen and\u00a0<\/em>late Romantic poets, [Updike] predicts that he will not write ‘unread masterpieces’ and thus consign Mary to poverty, but instead please an audience the way he knows he can with his drawings (which were roughly in the manner of James Thurber). This will be as a humorous writer of some kind, and ‘if I am going to be a humorist, I must get the idea of infinity out of my head \u2014 there has never been a humorist who lived in infinity; humor is manipulation of limitations, a series of contrasts of finite objects.’ He would treat the writer\u2019s page as an enclosed world, putting on hold the infinite questions, religious and existential, and working up the laughs from the combination of a few elements,” Robinson wrote.<\/p>\n

“Updike was not, of course, to limit himself, either in his seeing, his imaginative journeying, or his learning. His fiction in particular, never satisfied with a ‘few elements,’ takes in much sensory information, his metaphors are sometimes extravagant, and he shows his knowledge of literature, theology, physics, history, music, painting, printing, even cars and golf. And then of course there is his own life, the main subject of the letters . . . .”<\/p>\n

Read the entire article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The October 2025 publication of Selected Letters of John Updike has occasioned numerous reviews and reactions, but for Kazuo Robinson and The Metropolitan Review it has sparked more of a series of ruminations on Updike and his works. Insights from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,59,11,53,35,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-letters","category-reviews","category-updike-in-context","category-updike-quoted","category-updikes-life-times"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061","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\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7062,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions\/7062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}