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John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic prose, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books.
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Quotations
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
Assorted Prose (1965)
All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
"Rabbit, Redux" (1969)
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Problems and Other Stories (1979)
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
"Rabbit, Redux" (1969)
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
"Rabbit, Redux" (1969)
Like water, blood must run or grow scum.
"Rabbit, Redux" (1969)
Encyclopedia
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic prose, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His work attracted a significant amount of critical attention and he was considered one of the most prominent contemporary American novelists. Updike died, aged 76, of lung cancer on January 27, 2009.
Early life
John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to author Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and Wesley Russell Updike, a high school mathematics teacher. John Updike was raised at 117 Philadelphia Avenue (now part of Route 724) in Shillington, Pennsylvania, until he was 13, when his family moved to a sandstone farmhouse in Plowville, Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he became interested in reading and writing.
Updike later recalled seeing his mother writing at her desk and feeling inspired. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk," her son later said. "I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in -- and come back in."
These early years in Berks County would shape the environment of the Rabbit tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories (The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, Of The Farm, A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, The Other Side of the Street, etc.) Updike later attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, before graduating summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English. After graduation, he decided to pursue a career in graphic arts and attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. On returning to the U.S., he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, but stayed only two years. Later, Updike moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts. It was alleged by many, including a columnist in a local newspaper, The Ipswich Chronicle, that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was, in fact, Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s are contained in a letter to the same paper published shortly following Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. It is believed that the towns of East Greenwich and Wickford, Rhode Island, served as the basis for Eastwick in The Witches of Eastwick.
Career
Updike became most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery." He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." Yet, on many occasions, Updike slipped away from familiar territory: The Witches of Eastwick (1984) later made into a movie of the same name and then a West End musical, concerned a New England coven of divorcees, and was a bestseller; The Coup (1978) about a fictional Cold War-era African dictatorship, was similarly a bestseller, and reflects the author writing at his most Nabokovian; his 2000 postmodern effort Gertrude and Claudius is a carefully researched overture to the story of Hamlet. Other important novels include The Centaur (National Book Award, 1963), Couples (1968) and Roger's Version (1986). Martin Amis called Roger's Version a "near-masterpiece"; Couples both landed the author on the cover of TIME magazine and made his fortune.
Updike enjoyed working in series: In addition to the five Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom novels, a recurrent Updike alter-ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). His stories involving the socially-conscious (and socially successful) couple 'The Maples' are widely considered to be autobiographical, and several were the basis for the television movie Too Far To Go starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner which was broadcast on NBC. Updike stated that he chose this surname for the characters because he admired the beauty and resilience of the tree.
Updike stated at the dawn of his career an intention to publish one book a year, and advancing years slowed down neither his production nor inventiveness. In 1994 he rewrote the tale of Tristan and Isolde, Brazil; a multi-generational saga about religion and entertainment, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996); and a science fiction novel, Toward the End of Time (1997). In Seek My Face (2002) he explored the post-war art scene. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His twenty-second novel, Terrorist, the story of a fervent, eighteen-year-old extremist Muslim in New Jersey, was published in June 2006; his sixth collection of non-fiction, "Due Considerations," appeared in the fall of 2007. His twenty-third novel, The Widows of Eastwick, was published in late 2008 and returned to the lives, thirty years later, of his three protagonists from the 1984 novel.
A large anthology of short stories from his literary career, titled The Early Stories 1953 – 1975 (2003) won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He wrote in its preface that his career's intention had been to "give the mundane its beautiful due."
Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. His lone foray into drama, Buchanan Dying: a play, constituted something of a reversal, as in a 1968 interview Updike had claimed: "the unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook." He further said: "From Twain to James and Faulkner to Bellow, the history of novelists as playwrights is a sad one."
In 2006 Updike was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. In 2008 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was entitled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art."
At the end of his life, Updike spent time with his four children and lived with his second wife, Martha. In his memoir, Self-Consciousness, Updike writes a letter to his two grandsons Anoff and Kwame, about the Updike family history, and asks that they not be ashamed of the color of their skin. (His grandsons are biracial, their father being from Ghana.) He also has grandsons named Wesley (who is also biracial, with a mother from Kenya), Trevor (whom he loved very much), Sawyer, Seneca and Kai (In order of maturity).
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer suffered from psoriasis and had connected it to his abilities as a writer. In Self Consciousness, he links his "skin's embarrassing overproduction" to his creativity.
He lived with his wife in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He died at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.
Evaluation
Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. Along with Toni Morrison, he was the most written about living American novelist of his time. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters," with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is near-universally acknowledged, even by those critics who are skeptical of Updike's significance as a novelist and of his larger artistic vision. Critics emphasize "his inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language, drawing comparisons to the prose of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov." Some critics consider him "fluent to a fault," others "question the depth and seriousness of his concerns" due to the supposed floweriness of his language, and some "[object] to Updike's portrayal of women, viewed by some as specious and misogynistic." Others more positively "suggest that Updike's employment of a dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader." Ultimately John Updike "remains highly esteemed as a foremost man of letters whose prodigious intelligence, verbal prowess, and shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life separate him from the ranks of his contemporaries."
His character Rabbit Angstrom, widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, joining Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like." The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maple stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean," and that Updike's death marked the "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument," and describing it, concluded:
Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.
This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size".
Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest (1990) "one of the very few modern novels in English (Bellow's Herzog is another) that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft...It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
In a widely-read essay, David Foster Wallace called Updike "both chronicler and voice of probably the single
most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Wallace claimed "to admire the sheer gorgeousness of [Updike's] descriptive prose" and called The Poorhouse Fair (1959), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) "all great books, maybe classics." But he criticized Updike's "protagonists who are basically all the same guy" and the "Great Male Narcissism" of his writing. Wallace ultimately concluded that Updike's fiction falls prey to a "radical self-absorption," as evidenced by the Updikean protagonists:
- The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.
The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote that "John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey." In a review of Updike's Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons," but there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview." Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract." He writes that Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and notes that Updike's unique style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence's subject. The beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of that language floats above reality, according to Wood:
For some time now Updike’s language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life’s gallant, battered ongoingness’, indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike’s language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan notes that Updike is "intensely intellectual," with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues." Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer." According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child." Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:
Updike’s sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust’s sentences in Updike’s description, they "seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.
Harold Bloom, the famous critic, once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist...He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987.
On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if he were given the chance to review Updike's Rabbit is Rich (1981). He replied:
- The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated...John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is -- the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.
The Fiction Circus called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each one jokingly representing signs of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world," like Nabokov before him. But, in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, there is a caveat to Updike's place in the "literary pantheon":
- But...I don't know anyone personally who thought of Updike as a vital writer. I don't mean that to say that Updike is somehow stiff, stultifying; he's the opposite to an unwholesome degree. What I mean is that I know several people who swear by Blood Meridian, Gravity's Rainbow, Goodbye, Columbus, even my personal pet peeve White Noise. These books cracked open lives, made people into readers. With the exception of our own Goodman Carter, who spent his pubescent years reading the Rabbit books obsessively, I don't know of anyone who says the same thing about Updike, or who even recommends his books beyond the Rabbit stuff.
Adam Gopnik evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing." He praises Updike's style, his significance as an American writer, and the integrity of his vision:
A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right.
Updike’s great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful. Unlike his European contemporaries, who saw the same space and the attempted filling as mere aridity and deprivation, Updike was close enough to, and fond enough of, the source of postwar material abundance to love it fully, and for itself. (And he knew enough of the decade of deprivation that preceded the big blossoming never to be jaded about plenty.) He viewed the material culture of American life with a benign, appreciative ironic eye. But he had no illusions, either, about its ability to cover the failure or wish away mortality.
Gore Vidal professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer." He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form." He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose." Vidal mockingly refers to Updike as "our good child," in reference to his wide establishment acclaim, and excoriates his alleged political conservatism. Vidal's ultimate conclusion is that
- Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up. In this most delicate of times, Updike has "builded" his own small, crude altar in order to propitiate or to invoke "the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword."
Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer...and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review of Books, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery :
The elegant and penetrating descriptions, however, composed from the chasm's edge—both the wisdom and the wise unknowingness—are among the main reasons one reads Updike. "Her gesture as she tips the dregs of white wine into a potted geranium seems infinite, like one of Vermeer's moments frozen in an eternal light from the left." His eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way.
In November 2008 the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature."
Themes
The principal themes seen in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would weave them together. For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960). Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books -- the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories -- demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course.
Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:
- His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.
Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family."
Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity as ZZ Packer elucidates:
- There seemed to me not many American novelists who were working so steadfastly in such riveting contradictions; both the patrician and the suburban, both sexual dynamism and sexual dysfunction, the commercial and the divine. There seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic.
The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed as, according to Julian Barnes, "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life." But as Updike saw a certain gorgeousness in everyday America, he also saw its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America." The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel The Widows of Eastwick (2008), notes that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits:
- Heavy on mortality, light on morbidity, Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.
Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief...And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next," demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work. For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less certain. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a certain kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "...But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell is afraid of his cancer and has no faith. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence." Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife," and indeed "many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech’s concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû’s lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God — looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'" Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
- And another regrettable thing about death
- is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
- which took a whole life to develop and market -
- the quips, the witticisms, the slant
- adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
- the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
- in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
- their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
- their response and your performance twinned.
- The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
- in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
- Who will do it again? That's it; no one;
- imitators and descendants aren't the same.
Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike’s aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962):
- I reasoned thus: just as the paper is the basis for the marks upon it, might not events be contingent upon a never expressed (because featureless) ground? Is the true marvel of Sunday skaters the pattern of their pirouettes or the fact that they are silently upheld? Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm.
In the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2004), Updike described his purpose in writing prose:
- Not only were the boxes useful for storing little things like foreign coins and cufflinks, but the caustic aura of cigars discouraged visitors. I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had become to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due.
Literary criticism and art criticism
In addition to his novels, poetry, and short stories, Updike was also a prominent critic of literature and art. He once laid out his personal rules for literary criticism, in the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose:
- 1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- 2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- 3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
- 4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.…
- 5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
- To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never...try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th century authors," typically in The New Yorker, always with an eye to make his reviews "animated." He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike often "meant something" in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews gave "huge boosts to the careers, for example, of Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer." Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy too, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review to Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.
His literary criticism has been praised for its conventional simplicity and profundity:
- Updike is what those in academe would, with no small disdain, call an old-fashioned appreciative critic, an aestheticist, a subjectivist. Shorn of the withering tone, this is a very fair assessment of Updike the critic, one that is pejorative only if we disallow that this kind of criticism holds an interest for the intelligent reader. Updike’s best work is informed less by fiat and declaration than by demonstration. Rather than worrying out loud over the state of literary criticism, he shows a commitment to it through practice.
Updike's art criticism often appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he frequently wrote about American art. Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?," dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th century. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence," is characterized by insecurity as compared with the artistic tradition of Europe." In Updike's own words:
- Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that “for the poet there are no ideas but in things.” No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principle study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
Cultural references
- Updike was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, entitled U and I (Random House, 1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his golf partner.
- In an episode of the animated series The Simpsons, "Insane Clown Poppy", John Updike is the ghost writer of a book that Krusty the Clown is promoting. The book's title is "Your Shoe's Too Big To Kickbox God," a 20-page book written entirely by John Updike as a money-making scam.
- Updike was featured on the cover of Time twice, on 26 April 1968 and again on 18 October 1982.
- In an episode of the television series Gilmore Girls, "In the Clamor and the Clangor", the main characters are attending a funeral and jocularly try to guess which members of the town will be the next to die, but they quickly realize the morbidity of their conversation and regret it, especially when ominous things begin to happen to the people they speculated dying, prompting Lorelai to say, "We are The Witches of Eastwick."
Bibliography
Rabbit novels
Bech books
- (1970) Bech, a Book
- (1982) Bech Is Back
- (1998) Bech at Bay
- (2001) The Complete Henry Bech
Buchanan books
Eastwick books
Other novels
The Scarlet Letter Trilogy
A Month of Sundays (1986) Roger's Version (1988) S.
Short Story Collections
The Same Door (1962) Pigeon Feathers (1964) Olinger Stories (a selection) (1966) The Music School (1972) Museums And Women (1979) Problems (1979) Too Far To Go (the Maples stories) (1987) Trust Me (1994) The Afterlife (2000) The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor) (2001) Licks of Love (2003) The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2009) My Father's Tears and Other Stories
Poetry
The Carpentered Hen (1963) Telephone Poles (1969) Midpoint (1969) Dance of the Solids (1974) Cunts: Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation (limited edition) (1977) Tossing and Turning (1985) Facing Nature (1993) Collected Poems 1953–1993 (2001) Americana: and Other Poems (2009) Endpoint and Other Poems
Non-fiction, essays and criticism
Assorted Prose (1975) Picked-Up Pieces (1983) Hugging The Shore (1989) Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) Just Looking (1991) Odd Jobs (1996) Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1999) More Matter (2005) Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2007) Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
Awards
Further reading and literary criticism
Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, New Jersey, 2006.Baker, Nicholas, U & I: A True Story, Random House, New York, 1991.Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of John Updike, Chelsea House, New York, 1987.Boswell, Marshall, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.Broer, Lawrence, Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2000.Campbell, Jeff H., Updike's Novels: Thorns Spell A Word, Midwestern State University Press, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1988.Clarke Taylor, C., John Updike: A Bibliography, Kent State Univeristy, Kent, Ohio, 1968.De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: A Bibliography, 1968-1993, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: The Critical Responses to the Rabbit Saga, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 2005.De Bellis, Jack, ed., The John Updike Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press, Santa Barbara, California, 2001.Detwiler, Robert, John Updike, Twayne, Boston, 1984.Greiner, Donald, "Don DeLillo, John Updike, and the Sustaining Power of Myth," UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, University of Delaware Press, Newark, Delaware, 2002.Greiner, Donald, John Updike's Novels, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1984.Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, Safe at Last in the Middle Years : The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel, Backinprint.com, New York, 2001.Hamilton, Alice and Kenneth, The Elements of John Updike, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1970.Karshan, Thomas, "Batsy," London Review of Books, 31 March 2005.Luscher, Robert M., John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, New York, 1993.McNaughton, William R., ed., Critical Essays on John Updike, GK Hall, Boston, 1982.Markle, Joyce B., Fighters and Lovers: Themes in the Novels of John Updike, New York University Press, 1973.Miller, D. Quentin, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.Newman, Judie, John Updike, Macmillan, London, 1988.O'Connell, Mary, Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1996.Olster, Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.Plath, James, ed., Conversations with John Updike, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, 1994.Pritchard, William, Updike: America's Man of Letters, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005.Ristoff, Dilvo I., John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History, Peter Lang, New York, 1998.Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.Schiff, James A., Updike's Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 1992.Schiff, James A., United States Author Series: John Updike Revisited, Twayne Publishers, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1998.Tallent, Elizabeth, Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike's Erotic Heroes, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, California, 1982.Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971.Thorburn, David and Eiland, Howard, eds., John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed., New Essays on Rabbit, Run, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.Uphaus, Suzanne H., John Updike, Ungar, New York, 1980.Vidal, Gore, "Rabbit's own burrow," Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1996.Wallace, David Foster, "John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One," New York Observer, 12 October 1997.Wood, James, "Gossip in Gilt," London Review of Books, 19 April 2001.Wood, James, "John Updike's Complacent God," The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Modern Library, New York, 2000.Yerkes, James, John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Missouri, 1999.
External links
- , includes full bibliography, biography, references, and access to more than 1000 pieces of Updike criticism.
- from
The New York Review of Books: A collection of pieces on the writer and his TLS critics over the past fifty years, including two pieces by Updike, from , January 29 2009.
Obituaries
Pictures
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