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

argh.

Kids these days.

Margaux darling!? Come back! All will be revealed in a small iridescent sphere!

The Widows of Eastwick (a sequel to Witches of..) - october 2008.

The end of 2008: new updike, new Roth, new president.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081126.wbadsex1126/BNStory/Entertainment/home

The 76-year-old American novelist was a finalist for this year's Bad Sex prize for his description of an explosive oral encounter in his latest book, The Widows of Eastwick, but lost out to British writer Rachel Johnso

i find almost all updike sex = bad sex

i've never been able to read updike. don't know why. i usually love that kind of stuff. maybe when i'm older or something. everytime i've tried a novel i've ended up getting really bored.

(this is me and richard ford too.)

I know why you can't read Updike - it's because reading him is like the process of extruding a turd but backwards.

He also wrote an introduction to a book by Bruno Schulz called Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which he seemed to like (although I admit I read it through tightly slitted eyes). It was a very bad book and it made me say very bad words and do violence at it.

last time i tried to read some richard ford short stories i saw my life flash before my eyes. sooooooo endless and tedious.

i think i just read louis auchincloss instead of updike. probably nowhere near as "brilliant", but way more entertaining.

i wanna read more cheever. i've got a really nice big fat hardcover collection of his stories that i need to get to.

Wow, Scott, you like Auchincloss? Glad to see a fellow fan.

He reminds me a bit of William Dean Howells: not a single sentence surprises, and he's so obsessed with a certain kind of professionalism that some of his scenarios aren't as conceived as fully as I'd like; but, wow, a certain kidn of professoinalism goes a long way: he publishes a book (two sometimes) a year.

and he's so obsessed with a certain kind of professionalism that some of his scenarios aren't as conceived as fully as I'd like

example of these "scenarios"? this doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I think his sentences, on a prose level, can be quite surprising: rich and lyrical. but his novels all read the same. maybe this is what you mean? i think his rabbit books are his best work and his stories are pretty boring.

Haha -- I was talking about Auchincloss; I guess I wasn't clear.

as for Updike, if he's written a novel as good as A Modern Instance or The Rise of Silas Lapham, I've missed it.

(to be fair, Updike did much to get Howells rehabilitated in the eighties)

well "as good as" is pretty subjective--and Howells and Updike are aiming for different things, so i don't think comparing them will get us anywhere

Subjective: "as good as"
Objective: died this morning.

had to read this sentence abt 5 times in one of the pieces in self-consciousness (which is v good btw)

I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irratiated with light from the opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.

!!

Hope he cracked a window.

that's precisely what I dislike about Updike: the precision with which it's overwritten.

lol turnoff

lol privilege embedded even at the grammatical level

but mainly lol turnoff

My problem is less with the writing and more just that he writes about doing kind of gross things in a self-congratulatory tone

well i mean it's updike. that is the writing

xp otm

actually I also hate "patiently masturbating" and also the fact that it's ski pants.

i hate brotherly pride. . . ew!!!!!

haha oh yeah that too. Really the whole thing is about as unsexy as it could be.

Google has "comradely pride"

Google has been known to be wrong

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

The 60's man

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

hes an asshole, thats his thing. i read "rabbit run" again last year. still enjoyed it and i love his style. i dont think the book condones his actions if anything it points out his delusions (and his immaturity).

So does Amazon

?

lol classic xp

maybe it's changed to comradely in later editions - i verbatim copied it out of the copy of the book i have - hardcover, tho sez First Trade Edition 1989 hm

not that it makes me like it, but "comradely" is much better than "brotherly" there and adds a lot of meaning to the passage -- it implies conspiracy and secret revolt rather than incest

The 60's man

― waterface, Wednesday, July 24, 2013 3:05 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm btw. the very next sentence (which tbf is a new paragraph), he talks abt smoking pot and wearing dashikis. the essay is abt him being the least liberal/dove-ish of his circle of peers

can a lil bit hear his voice saying 'do you take advantage of the new freedoms?'

That single sentence really is quintessential Updike. Vermeer with ski-pants and a hard-on.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/john-updike-life-in-fiction-adam-begley.html

http://i57.tinypic.com/v4xuoh.jpg

Hanging wit U

70s swinger look new england division. also is that a bust of the author over the door? the shades made me think of andy warhol

Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged. You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.

bury me in this lede https://t.co/YGsHFb3nlr pic.twitter.com/GWBw5zQ9fU

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) October 2, 2019

It's a great piece.

My day has been saved

It's so good. I guess I'm going to have to get over the creepy-sounding title of her book, because I want to read more like that.

(the whole lrb piece, not just the lede)

i hadn't known about the foster wallace-mary karr thing she obliquely refers to o_O

When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. Janice is a grotesquerie with a watery drink in one hand and a face full of television static; her emotional needs are presented as a gaping, hungry and above all unseemly hole, surrounded by well-described hair. He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday. In the scene where Janice drunkenly drowns the baby, it wasn’t the character I felt pity for but Updike, fumbling so clumsily to get inside her that in the end it’s his hands that get slippery, drop the baby.

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.

Her book, Priestdaddy, is great.

Best revive ever

apart from her lrb pieces, has she been doing criticism elsewhere, because its much better than her other writing. I have her most recent book of poems and it was v disappointing. haven't read priestdaddy though.

her piece on lucia berlin was good but i haven't read any lucia berlin

Lucia Berlin is good. Believe the hype.

^^^^^

Priestdaddy is very much in the voice of her review work

well written crit def, i still like updike idk i think hes true to himself/honest in a misogynist & outdated way

maybe someone should make a lockwood thread

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.