John Updike

"Rabbit, Run" is the book i have made most aborted attempts to read (beautiful sentences, yes) and the only other book of Updike's i have read is the beautiful "Self Consciousness" which is a (sort of) autobiography.

What do people think of his actually writing the books 10 years apart for 40 years? What kind of confidence does it take to start a project this when you're, what was he, 25 years old? I'd like to know more about that actually, how much he had planned or envisioned what was to come for Rabbit.

Of the three Updike short stories I can immediately recall, I hated the one that appeared in the Atlantic about religion & 9/11, thought Should Wizard Hit Mommy? was mediocre, and really like The Walk With Elizanne. Probably because I was a band dork.

I think it's a marvellously entertaining little book.

Updike was reputedly on The Simpsons the other night.

A few highlights come to mind: the last paragraph of Rabbit Redux has something along the lines of "In the air above them, all sorts of winged presences were making themselves felt." Magnificent.

There is a shortish short story called "The Brown Chest," I think it is in the collection called The Afterlife, that goes "the sweetish deep cedary smell, undiminished, cedar and camphor and paper and cloth, the smell of family, family without end."

My grudging affection for Updike resides more in these little bits of crystal-perfect language than in anything to do with the themes and plots and ideas.

That said, Roger's Version and The Centaur are undeniably good novels. Museums and Women is my favorite of his story collections, mostly because of the piece "Under the Microscope" which envisions a cocktail party attended by single-celled organisms.

His light verse is also quite delightful if you like that sort of thing. Here's one:

LAMENT, FOR COCOA

The scum has come.
My cocoa's cold.
The cup is numb,
And I grow old.

It seems an age
Since from the pot
It bubbled, beige
And boiling hot.

To hot to be
Too quickly quaffed
Accordingly,
I found a draft

And in it placed
The boiling brew
And took a taste
Of toast or two.

Alas, time flies,
As oft time will
My cocoa lies
Dull brown and still

How wearisome!
In likelihood
The scum, once come,
is come for good.

It's no surprise that I like him most when a gimmick takes him out of that milieu (like finding God with a computer in Roger's Version, having mythological characters run a high school in The Centaur, partying with amoebas in "Under the Microscope.")

Like I said, he can be quite infuriating and overblown but every once in a while he comes up with something so heartbreakingly beautiful that I forgive him (temporarily).

Nasty!

In general = in Updike, in literature, or in general general (i.e. a joke -- I have not spent much time with children while not a child myself so maybe I expect consistency where there shouldn't be) ?

although I'll have to consult my notes

A joke, then? Or you're a better reader than I.

But at the same time, Bech is not much of a character--more a conduit for Updike to express certain things about the writing life that would have been problematic for him to say with his own mouth.

By which I don't mean that Bech = Updike; rather that Updike used Bech both as a surrogate and as a point of contrast. He's Updike's mouthpiece when he needs him to be, but different enough (Jewish, hornier, less modest) to allow Updike a sort of playground.

From a French 12 years girl just arrived in a US school >>.
thanks

that was a fantastic piece, yeah. especially loved this: "he grows up, in short, but not into a real adult, just into a country club member."

It’s almost as if she absorbed his novelistic style and used it against him and absorbed his critical style as well and used it to restore the balance, to give some semblance of fairness.

Which is awesome

I myself used could never pull off such a feat, I used way too many “ands” in that sentence, just to name one thing.

“If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.”

john downdog

Yeah nearly bought the Berlin book yesterday but ended up getting a Pavese reader

i've only read the first of the rabbit books -- tbh the descriptions and quotes from the later ones in that article sound horrific

Redux is pretty terrible, a mess, but is Rich is his best book, I'd say.

Probably the best in this genre of "young woman reviews old white man" that you see a lot of editors in various publications throwing up. Its both a waste of her energies and yet one of her best essays, possibly one of the best things Lockwood will ever write. Which could be depressing.

I suspect editors don't really know what to do with her, she's clearly a very talented writer but does not really fit into post huffpo content genres very easily and sits awkwardly between cerebral and literal on one hand and "refreshing" and unpretentious on the other. Some of her poetry is terrible and her interests are so much about style and genre to the extent that when she turns to "real world issues" she can seem very half formed.

Is priestdafdy a real memoir or part fiction ?

piece is prob the best i've ever read on updike-- always liked the DFW one but it's v slight (+ the line lockwood quotes as its takeaway is iirc a footnote in the voice of a "female acquaintance"); the real previous champ was the vidal essay quoted towards the end, a long and largely biographical piece of character assassination i love to reread

Although Updike seems never to have had any major psychic or physical wound, he has endured all sorts of minor afflictions. In the chapter "At war with my skin," he tells us in great detail of the skin condition that sun and later medicine would clear up; for a long time, however, he was martyr to it as well as a slave to his mirror, all the while fretting about what "normal" people would make of him. As it proved, they don't seem to have paid much attention to an affliction that, finally, "had to do with self love, with finding myself acceptable ... the price high but not impossibly so; I must pay for being me." The price for preserving me certainly proved to be well worth it when, in 1955, he was rejected for military conscription, even though the empire was still bogged down in Korea and our forces were increased that year from 800,000 to three million--less Updike, who, although "it pains me to write these pages," confesses that he was "far from keen to devote two years to the national defense." He was later to experience considerable anguish when, almost alone among serious writers, he would support the Vietnam War on the ground that who am I "to second-guess a president?" One suspects that he envies the clear-skinned lads who so reluctantly fought for the land he so deeply loves.

he also says that in the beauty of the lilies would better be titled the evening dews and damps

anyway, a great long-running lil genre

I like the Gilbert Sorrentino takedown of him, but coterie writer of little distinction so not many have read it

I assume Priestdaddy features some fictionalized elements but I also assume that some of the most ridiculous parts are true.

sorrentino is a better and more important writer than updike

idst

More discussion here: updike novels poll

In the end Wallace loved the sinner, as Updike wanted us to love Rabbit Angstrom. And part of the problem with our 360-degree view of modern authors is knowing where to put any of it. Wallace’s vivisection of Updike’s misogyny seems calm and cool and virtuous, and then you remember that to the best of anyone’s knowledge Updike never tried to push a woman out of a moving car.

I suspect editors don't really know what to do with her, she's clearly a very talented writer but does not really fit into post huffpo content genres very easily and sits awkwardly between cerebral and literal on one hand and "refreshing" and unpretentious on the other. Some of her poetry is terrible and her interests are so much about style and genre to the extent that when she turns to "real world issues" she can seem very half formed.

― plax (ico), Tuesday, 8 October 2019 bookmarkflaglink

I've yet to read anything beyond what she's written for the LRB (apart from her tweets) but I think it's working out well. iirc it began as writing on women -- her piece on Cusk was almost necessary because there's a lot of people that can't deal with her -- and the Updike is something else yet you can see the trajectory.

It's the LRB at 40 issue, and a good way to match to Empson on Skakey all the way back.

I think I'd still take Of the Farm, the first 3 Rabbit books and a few stories with me (wherever that may be). There's something about his rendering of moment-to-moment perception that I like (albeit he's no Nabokov, and Alfred's point about the 'complacency' of his descriptions is naggingly correct). Ach, maybe Lockwood is right and it was just sheer propulsion that dragged me along.

Will look up her memoir, for sure.

Jesus - I'd pretty much expunged Skeeter from my mind. OK, I'll drop Redux.

I went to a used bookstore today and they had two of old rabbit hardcovers , some short story collections , and bech hardcover. Might go back and buy them out tomorrow

The Rabbits diminish in quality over time IMO. There is some pretty fresh writing in the first 1.5, but by the end it gets dreary. And some VERY problematic race/sex shit appears.

Bech is a time capsule. If you're interested in literary life of that time period, the Bech stuff is illuminating. There are flashes of what JHU himself might have been feeling and experiencing, like signing flyleaf pages that will later be tipped in.* Bech's Jewishness is a red herring to throw you off the scent. Updike knew a lot about some things; I don't think Jewishness was one of those things.

Snag them if you want, but they are probably in a public library somewhere. I have read all of those books exactly once. Yes I probably own the hardcovers (currently in storage), but these days I mostly only buy books that I want to refer to or re-read.

* yes, I own a "signed first edition" Updike. Witches of Eastwick.

But it's not organic or rare or valuable - it was explicitly created as a "signed first edition," and marketed as such.

Sorry to be so ornery, because I do admire him as a stylist. On the short story collections: some of them are extremely good! Highly recommended: Museums and Women, Problems, and whichever one has "The Brown Chest" in it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/05/the-brown-chest/667775/

Yeah they had the hardcover of museums…tempting. A time capsule for sure

I was curious a few weeks back whether Updike (passing in 2009) had done any podcast interviews, and then enjoyed this two-part one from 2006 on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm.

Okay despite all the usual critiques of Updike, Museums and Women is fucking amazing. There's a hilarious and expertly crafted story about amoebae going to a cocktail party. One about Japanese Jesus. One about prehistoric animals. One about advances in farming technology.

In all his vast catalog there are only a few books that manage to escape his main subject matter (drab New England WASP adultery and its dreary complications). Museums and Women is by far the best of them. Grab it.

None of those premises sound appealing to me lol

You’re saying the book is not about museums and women?

It's about women as museums.

If you think a middle-aged suburban white guy wondering whether or not to cheat on his wife is an interesting premise, but a euglena going a cocktail party isn't, I just don't know what to tell you.

ftr I admire Updike's criticism: thanks to him, I discovered Henry Green and Muriel spark, among others. And he was generous toward Cheever. But I could never finish his fiction, not once. The facility, the complacency of the descriptions -- it had a lulling effect. He and Cheever get bound together, but Cheever was fuckin' weird.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 3, 2019

"The Brown Chest" (lovely; thanks for the rec!) isn't The Afterlife.

Lord Alfred: The last paragraph of "The Brown Chest" kills me every time. For all my crankitude about JHU, that "Family, family without end" passage is crystalline and pretty much perfect.

Bastard.

Is IN The Afterlife, a later story collection.

I liked that conclusion too.

Yes! I am casting my memory back to The Afterlife, and another interesting story in that collection is "Aperto, Chiuso." It's a pretty thorny bit of misogyny that is paradoxically revealing.

The woman is being portrayed as irrational and hysterical. The guy is presenting himself as decent and well-intentioned and perplexed by her irrationality. But then on second thought, he's the viewpoint character so he's obviously sculpting the narrative; if you read it through 21st-century eyes you can see that he's actually being kind of a dick. Not sure if that's how Updike saw it but that's my current reading.

That's good that the story lets you do that: a strong. always pertinent POV, suitable for different interpretations.
xp first gondolier first gondola, I meant! Proustian Slip, but also I was trying to suppress reference to Updike as my thoughtful gondolier on this maiden voyage through his review, because too corny even for me.

But even or especially with Pinter's crisp, startling reduction, there's a sense of gliding conveyed by Updike's impressions of his reading and thinking experience.

Carefully guided, responsive gliding.

Glide, Rabbit, Glide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxkjvKBPQjo

I read RABBIT, RUN, and greatly admired its style, and was surprised and maybe even disturbed by its drama.

I have a Henry Green book signed by John Updike. The man must have put his signature in everything.

Reminds me of the time David Markson's library ended up at The Strand.

A friend of mine brought a copy of Nicholson Baker’s U and I to a reading for Updike to sign.

I saw a film trailer today for something called Living which I was sure was a Henry Green adaptation. I want to believe.

Apparently it's an Englishing of a Kurosawa movie.

Oh right.