My school library had two handsome first editions of Rabbit, Run and The Centaur. Alongside Madame Bovary, they were my absolute favorite books I read that year, the year I learned the true aesthetic potential of literature beyond the drudgery of the classroom. For that I’ll always hold those two Updike novels close to my heart.
That is the way I feel about Hemingway. His books were instrumental in my becoming a reader and I never fail to return back to the first time I read his books when I reread them.
Updike is the real deal. HIs short stories are best. Couples is good. In the Beauty of the Lilies is good. All of Rabbit is best. Don't bother with the Witches of Eastwick unless you want to. He wrote a surprise book called The Terrorist that needs to be read.
I enjoyed Updike quite a bit. Reading the Rabbit Angstrom books was a lot like reliving my own life as another person in another setting, admittedly, as an American male of roughly the same age. I was nothing like Rabbit but understood him. I will agree that that might not appeal to a lot of people but it did to me. Anybody who's read much fiction can probably feel a certain identity with one or more characters in a similar manner. I went back and reread the "Rabbit" tetralogy about 10-years-ago and liked it even more than I'd remembered which is often not the case when I reread books from that far in the past. Updike does a good job of describing the background culture that his rich tapestry of characters are threading their way through, a period of about 40 years. The events weren't mind boggling dramatic but he made them feel authentic and believable. (Maybe I should shoehorn "verisimilitude" into this; but, it makes me feel too self-conscious and pretentious to try it 😉.) A dramatic accidental death of a child plus the mundane marital difficulties, dealings with in-laws, economic struggles, all that everyday stuff presented in a rather straightforward fashion has its appeal -- even the tv commercials were used to good effect. The one young black radical that took up with the Angstroms for a while which ended with their house burning down(?) might have been the biggest thing that happened in the whole series except for, of course, Rabbit's own death from a heart attack. But again, to use an overused term, it felt "real". Updike likely won't be remembered as a great writer but he was a skilled, interesting, introspective, and highly intelligent writer. I have no idea if anybody will be reading him in a hundred years; but, I just wanted to say a good word about the music and the mothers from Nashville if you know what I mean. Another old fart probably needs to translate that for you. I'm up way too late as it is.
This is such a great comment. I like Updike less than you but your description of his work and his skills is pretty spot on. And I agree with your assessment of the future of his work as well.
@@katietatey It was nothing, Katie. I regretted it instantly when I looked at it the next morning. I know I could have edited it out but decided not to do it. It comes from the ending of an old song by the folk/rock group, The Loving Spoonful, called "Nashville Cats". The phrase has been used by, maybe, half a dozen people who have ever lived on planet Earth, to refer to an unexpected opportunity to comment on a subject that, in their eyes, popped up out of the blue. It doesn't even make good sense since it's obvious that the The Loving Spoonful set up their chance to comment by writing the song to begin with. Having said all that, the song is pleasant enough to get an old boomer's toes to tapping (sort of). We need all the circulation to the extremities that we can muster. Google it. You might like the tune. It's about as innocuous as you'll ever find.
I’ve read two Updikes - Rabbit, Run and Memories Of The Ford Administration. I was indifferent to Rabbit, Run and I think I took your advice that if one is underwhelmed by Rabbit, Run there’s no point in following it up with the rest of the series. Memories Of The Ford Administration remains one of the most pretentious novels I’ve ever read - so pretentious it boggled my mind: the section where a copulating couple is likened to a space station docking with its satellite stays in the mind as a real low for 20th century literature. You make a good point about the MCMs - I somehow doubt Mailer’s reputation will ever recover, but I think Herzog and Henderson will keep Bellow’s name current in the future. They were indeed part of the first generation to be able to write frankly about sex and, being men, they naturally wrote about from a male perspective. They shouldn’t be called out for that.
Of all the writers considered to be mcm’s I like Bellow the most, though Augie March is my favorite I have not read the Ford Admin book, but that description makes it sound awful.
I've read more than 3/4th of his body of work. Amazing style combined with amazing width of subjects. Updike is not only about sex, but also about family life, getting older, religion, society, morality etc.
I’m afraid I have never read anything by Updike, and for that matter, nor have I read Mailer, Roth or Bellow. I detect a yawning gap in my 20th century reading (one of many😢). I’m more a DeLillo kind of reader if that makes sense? I wonder if a similar obscurity is now where Martin Amis is heading. Death seems to be a bad career move for most novelists but is sometimes the making of rock musicians!
I meant to comment on this, but it was a busy week with the end of school. Updike was definitely elevated as a poet and short story writer during my middle and high school education. My eighth grade grammar teacher bragged about meeting Updike . . . I think you’re on point about how Updike’s readership was similar to his characters, and his long tenure as a critic at the New Yorker gave him a level of cachet. I’ve honestly enjoyed his stories and his essays significantly more than any of his novels. The feelings and sentiments he focuses on, and his attention to detail work much better at that length than a verbose but thematically vacuous four hundred page novel. Now the real question is, when are we doing a Jonesing for John Updike readathon?!? Cheers, Jack
Latin americans have discovered Cheever and Updike, and some groups of readers here in U.S. are getting a real grasp on this writers, why that is? In the last several decades many latin families went from working class to the middle, while whose became the upper-middle class and what happened was a downturn in their fortunes and what Updike and Cheever did was tell us what americans had been and were they were going, and both were at their best in the short story. Their work speaks to those that find themselves in the same delution of what money and better prospects in their career can do and what it can't! Many readers I've spoken to, have said that Updikes Rabbit tetralogy has more to say about being the all american people than anything written by Fitzgerald. Myself, I have always found parallels in the works of O'Hara, Updike, Cheever or even Capote in today's society, I believe we alway will!
Thank you for your great comment and insights. I had no idea that Latin Americans had begun reading Updike and the others. I certainly agree that O’Hara and Cheever were best in n their short stories. I’m not sure the message of their work about peoples future as Americans would necessarily be an optimistic one.
@@BookishTexan God, not optimistic! Repeating the same mistakes as they rise financially and the breakdown of the family unit, like my family, that are now living the result of the American dream, that living in the white picked fence with the dream about spouses and material comfort is not what's is cracked up to be. Never found any of these writers optimistic!
I tried to read American Pastoral and DNF’d it about halfway through. The writing was great but the story and characters felt stale and flat, o couldn’t stay interested.
Updike is definitely part of that group of 20th century white blokes the BookTube has canceled. I read Rabbit, Run when I was in seminary and found it genuinely shocking, especially the ending which punched me in the gut. I burned through Redux and is Rich soon after and then he published Rabbit is Rest which my then girlfriend, now wife, bought for me in hardback. It was a big deal given that we were both students at the time. That I complained that it would not sit well on the shelf with my ratty paperbacks of the earlier novels was not the adoring expression of gratitude she might have expected. Not my finest moment. I also read the first two Bech books and Couples, which is peak Updike. also Roger's Version, Marry Me and the collection Licks of Love which included the novella Rabbit Remembered. For me Updike represents the late century American WASP. He presented a world where middle-aged people were 15 years into an unhappy second marriage. He seemed to be obsessed with women that were "wall-eyed," an expression that I had never heard. Everyone drank too much. It was utterly alien to me, a sheltered Jewish boy from London. And yet Rabbit, that high school hero turned mediocrity, felt entirely relatable. He is Amory Blaine and every other Fitzgerald disappointment. Like everyone else, I haven't read Updike for years, but he loomed large in my early life as a reader and the Rabbit books, written over 4 decades, will remain a key touchstone of literature of the time.
I think Updike was “cancelled” before widespread social media availability. But I agree with your description of the content of his work. Rabbit Run didn’t hit me the way it did you and I read the others out of inertia. Maybe I should have made Updike one of my accidental authors. As far as cancelling I think it’s that his books cover subjects, characters that are just not of interest to readers the way they used to be. I think it’s fashion more than social justice. If he were being vilified his works would at least be read and discussed.
I read Highsmith’s _The Price of Salt._ The theme of sex (while not explicit) fit right in with what you were saying, and seemed an integral part of the literary milieu of the time. A lot of cocktails, a lot of lighting up cigarettes, that served no function, except the “verisimilitude” (to use another commenter’s word). I’ve never read Mailer but read about him, and he sounds that way; and while decades separate me from them I imagine Baldwin’s novels to be like that also. Updike has seven volumes at Library of America: five compilations of novels, two of stories. So he should be remembered, but we can never predict posterity’s “take” can we? I haven’t read him-beyond the occasional review etc.-but it’s sure interesting to read people’s experiences here in the comments.
Baldwin’s books are not without sex, but I think you will find there is a difference in the role in which sex is used in plot and characterization. I still need to read a Highsmith.
I watched a rather famous interview/ confrontation between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show which took me down a bit of a rabbit hole which included John Updike. i found it really interesting that these guys, clearly in love with their own voices, were all the rage for a time but now seem to have become almost obscure. Funny how that's worked out. That didn't seem to happen to Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and others who might be considered the previous generation. Sorry I appear to have gone off on a tangent 🤣
I have seen that too (I actually went down kind of wormhole watching old Dick Cavett episodes myself not long back). Great description of both Mailer and Vidal. Fitzgerald kind of disappeared for a while after his death then schools here started to teach The Great Gatsby. Hemingway's popularity has rises and falls but he stays present in the reading world I think. He was certainly no less a misogynist that Updike, Roth, etc. I suspect the prohibitions against writing directly about sex kind of saved him from making his work focus on it in the way that the midcentury fellas did. I love a good tangent.
I don’t get the hoopla of misogyny around Roth and Updike. They were basically writing about the urban American male and his dynamics with the corresponding society at the time. They just wrote what they experienced first hand with a bit exaggeration and dramatic flair. And by some of today’s standards almost all straight urban American males of 60s and 70s would be called misogynists. I find it bewildering when people expect a piece of mainstream fiction of a certain time as some pamphlet of author’s personal views and ethics. P.S: almost everyone in my fathers generation who reads is a huge Updike or a Roth fan. So clearly they were hitting a chord with them big time.
I just talked about Updike with someone and we talked about many of the same things. From my point of view they are clearly misogynists but that isn’t a reason not to read them. They were products of the culture at the time. I read a great deal of Updike in the 80s&90s and enjoyed some of it, but now it just feels like an exaggerated description of life in the 50s&60s that has no real relevance or depth. What seemed profound in their work no longer seems that way to me. Updike’s work has no or little about it that will last.
I believe that any artist's reputation is not truly established until at least fifty years after their death. Today Johann Sebastian Bach is considered one of the greatest composers ever. Yet, his music fell out of regard after his death. It was not until 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn mounted a performance of St. Matthew's Passion and more or less reintroduced Bach's music to the public did Bach's music once more start to be heard with any sort of regularity. If one compares Baroque music with music from the Romantic era of Beethoven, they are very dissimilar. One came into fashion while the other fell out of it. Fashion is the key word. I believe "what happened" with John Updike has nothing to do with his value as an author. Rather, I believe that society has changed and the shift in moral attitudes has temporarily left Updike behind. I have only read Rabbit Run by Updike so I cannot speak to his entire oeuvre. In that book I found the character of Harry Angstrom repellent. However, as a reader, I do not read books to have my own attitudes reinforced. Whenever I find something I read challenging, I consider the validity of my own beliefs rather than assuming my way of thinking is the only way to go. I love challenges in the books I read. If there are none, I feel cheated. With Rabbit Run I was appalled by attitudes and behaviors. However, I recognized right off the bat that Updike was not presenting a personal view of the world. He was chronicling the society as it existed in reality. That's what authors do. They are historians in the realm of literary fiction. I am seventy-four years-old. I knew people that were like the characters in Rabbit Run. I may not have been an adult but I remember vividly hearing adults around me discussing key parties. I remember when the local Shriners Club made headlines when they got caught having key parties. If what I read is required to support my own views of life, I'd have precious few books to read. Today's man can say he is more aware than men back in the heyday of when Updike wrote his books. Yet, in spite of all the awakening that's gone on in today's man's consciousness, he is still like a horny teenager looking for something or someone to score. Being truly aware is admitting the bad with the good. Right here, right now John Updike may be considered a has been or a never was author. But, time and attitudes are continuously in flux. Just because society feels one way today does not have much bearing on what society feels in the future. I suspect Updike will experience a re-examination as an artist as did Bach. Criticism based upon personal opinions does not serve the arts. What we are experiencing as a society today is a fragility of the self. It can't last.
So great to here from you. It has been some time. Thank you for the excellent comment. I don’t disagree with much of what you wrote. Your point about artists and authors going in and out of fashion is well made. There is no telling which author from Updike’s generation will experience a renaissance. My guess it is that it will more likely be Bellow and/or Roth than Updike. In a way I think Updike’s productivity will harm him. But perhaps, like Balzac it will cement a permanent place for him. For me the sex obsessed work of Updike and Company ages poorly not because of the sex, but because it seems so juvenile. Rabbit Angstrom I think proves this. It mirrors the rather immature attitude of the time we’ll, but I don’t think that will serve Updike or the others well. People will always be interested in sex, but I doubt that in the future the way sex is portrayed in Updike will be appealing. It’s not prudery, I think, but maturity or maybe sophistication is a better term.
I read the Rabbit novels and a few others. Good, but not great books. His star power as an author has definitely faded since I first read him in the 80s. But I’m not so sure any current authors who have replaced him will retain their star power either decades from now.
Great discussion! I lump Updike in the category of authors I was regularly assigned to read in my MFA creative writing workshops. Mid-to-late 20th century American white authors of the realist tradition. I think if we had been assigned a wider variety of fiction to read (and emulate), I wouldn't be so sick of authors like Updike today! Too bad for Updike! Thanks for the great video.
That may be what happened to me only more voluntarily. I read a bunch of the msm writers in my twenties, Updike among them. I tried to read Roth’s American Pastoral last year and found it pretty lifeless, like I had read a version of it before, and I DNF’d it half way through.
During Updike's lifetime, New York was the US center for publishing and media. I suggest that Updike's popularity was enhanced because the media elite deemed him the golden boy of writers. So he was regularly published by the New Yorker and NY Review of Books. The book industry public relations department promotes writers like General Mills promotes Cheerios. His popularity was manufactured and boosted in an artificial way. He seemed more popular than he was.
These are really good insights and things I had not considered (other than the New Yorker). This explains a lot about why his popularity dropped off so quickly.
“The Witches of Eastwick” was a thoroughly enjoyable read for me. I am bracing myself for any possible videos on Philip Roth( the greatest writer of all time). 😃 I acknowledge that Roth’s writing includes sexual fixations, however I would argue against claiming that is his main focus. Two of his best novels( in my opinion) “The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America” are eerily prescient. I know you DNF’D “American Pastoral” 😱, but I urge you to read these two books.
Updike can be delicious, when read selectively. I liked his early short stories (A&P was one), The Centaur, Rabbit, Run (though slightly less), and The Witches of Eastwick, and then Brasil less so again. He was always brilliant but his suburban sexual fixations demonstrated his narrowness, even provinciality for me. Yet he may have been a genius; in an interview on PBS years ago I noted he spoke, not just in perfect sentences but in entire, finished paragraphs, and not previously rehearsed answers but as original thoughts wonderfully articulated. Our own Nabokov, in a way, maybe.
In the Eighties, I had some friends who worshipped him. I read a couple of books and thought mostly that they were just dull. Most literary figures fade away. With someone like Updike, his best chance of maintaining a reputation would be to get taught in school. Not a chance for secondary school, and I think most colleges would have passed him by, even if we were not seeing a major push in colleges for “inclusivity.”
I agree the key to longevity for most writers is to find their way onto academic course reading lists. I think our assessments of his work are the same for the most part.
well at least updike wrote books that were both readable and enjoyable to read unlike wallace's fiction infinite jest is something I can only use as a doorstop
The only Updike novel I've read is The Centaur. It was assigned in a college class. I haven't thought of that book in years! It was meh for me although it did win the National Book Award. I've never been interested in reading more Updike.
Never an Updike fan but most of my favorite writers have gone out of favor. Henry Miller. Anais Nin. Tom McGuane. Jim Harrison. Larry McMurtry,. John Irving. I could probably keep going and I know they're almost all men but that's just off the top of my head. Hemmingway seems to have made a bit of a comeback. He went out of favor for a few decades.
I'd never heard of Updike before this video. I guess he was mostly before my time. I was born in 1988. I also don't read very many novels. It wouldn't occur to me to read a novel about men's sex lives in the 1960s. I sort of understand why that would be considered an intellectual topic, but I sort of don't.
I think your comment is exactly what Davide Foster Wallace was getting at. Updike's work were products of a very specific time and cultural moment and their focus is not very appealing to readers anymore. Thanks Melissa
I'm inclined to dislike Updike by and large, though I like some of his short stories. Oof, reading Rabbit, Run was a painful and triggering experience that still makes me wince. His favorite subject matter overall seems a kind of indulgent narcissism fed and watered by the long postwar prosperity (for the straight, white male). Less interesting Mad Men characters. I'd run into his criticism et al. in the New Yorker, and he could of course write beautifully but I think he sometimes wrote lyrically for lyricism's sake, imparting empty calories to his sentences. I'd reckon he's not much missed except maybe by David Remnick.
I have an embarrassing confession... I own every single one of Updike's books. And I've read all of them except I haven't finished all his volumes of literary criticism (there are 6 and they are dense). My Dad was a big Updike fan and I'd read the Rabbit books in high school as well as a few others that I really liked. I don't know why I loved Rabbit, Run so much, but there was something about Harry that just seemed very real to me. I didn't like him, he was a total a-hole, but he reminded me of men I know. Anyway, I tend to be someone who collects things and also someone who tries to read everything by an author. I have everything published by a few authors, but Updike was so prolific! During the pandemic, I started collecting more and more of his books and then I decided to get all of them. I guess it's like people who collect all of Stephen King's books... there are a lot! It turns out that I liked his short stories and his books that were about relationships like Marry Me, Couples, The Centaur, Villages, and Too Far to Go the best. There were a number of books that I didn't particularly like at all (The Coup, Terrorist, Toward the End of Time, Seek My Face) but I kept reading them anyway because I was on a mission. It's 63 books in total, by the way (including a few volumes of poetry and some art criticism). I just checked. Totally embarrassing. :)
No reason to ever be embarrassed. He was a good writer. I just didn’t like most of his plots or characters. I think it’s amazing that you read all of his books. You definitely have a better foundation from which to assess him than I do. Thanks as always Katie.
When I was young each Updike book published seemed to be a big deal, and I read a lot of them. 25+ years ago I read the four Rabbit books and enjoyed them a lot. Not sure I would as much anymore. I think the most recent I have read is In the Beauty of the Lilies, which you mention. I found it quite good. Roger's Version is another that I recall liking a lot. But you are correct in that he and others such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, etc. are not too much talked about these days. The biggest Roth news since his death was about his biographer having been accused of something or other negative involving a woman. Updike is notably a WASP and these other three are Jewish male writers (I think Mailer is; Roth and Bellow definitely). They are all definitely worth reading, and Roth is a particular favorite of mine. But yes, nowadays that subject matter provokes a little controversy.
Updike could write very well and he was capable of creating funny and poignant scenes. Mailer is, I think the most forgotten (deservedly so), Roth the one who I think is still most likely to survive, and Bellow the best, I think, of those you listed. Don DeLillo is my favorite of those I think. His novel Underworld is amazing.
@@BookishTexan Life's lessons are pretty much universal. All writers are basically dealing with the same material, but I can't think of a writer who said it more eloquently than Updike. For that he's panned?
It's so funny looking at history how there's a lot of authors famous or infamous in their lifetime and forgotten or in the margins afterward and others who hsve no noteriety in their life and explosion after.
@@BookishTexanExactly my thoughts. My god if you look back, people like Updike, Mailer, Vidal were basically high profile celebrities of their time. Appearing on talks shows, swooned by the entertainment industry etc. How quickly did the digital age has changed all that😅
Funny, people can't see the forest for the trees. If you have mixed feelings about him, you still have feelings. There is a response. That's all you need to be relevant. He made art that mattered. So. Personally, I'll give him a shot. I'm going to try Rabbit, Run and see how it goes in 2023.
@@BookishTexan btw I appreciate the spoiler-less review. sheesh I clicked a few I wish I didn't. still think it should be a good read I appreciate the content. subscribed!
I have read Updike, many years ago, and I could not tell you what those books were about. I just can't remember much about them, which is probably enough of a review.
Thanks I appreciate this. For me as a reader, the Rabbit books (all of them) absolutely nail ONE aspect of American social-economic circumstances during those times. I've read about 5-6 other books and they were just really not interesting. If I say he shot his literary wad on the Rabbit books is that appropriate?
I just found Updike's novels boring. I always liked him when I heard him interviewed and I like his critical wriiting. I was in college in the early 1970s (yes, I'm old) and I was assigned Updike, Mailer, Bellow, etc. I'm overgeneralizing in a big way here buit it seemed to me that many of these books included disregard and mistreatment of women Then the male protagonist would spend some part of the narrative wondering why women didn't like him. I always wondered if the authors realized their male characters were a-holes.
Thank you for the great comment. I kind of think they knew their characters were a-holes but still thought that’s the way men were and there was no changing them. There books do seem boring to me, though there are a few Bellow books that I like.
I also find it very odd that he fell off the face of the Earth after his death :-) well, I guess he did, literally, but his regard… I find a lot of American authors back then sex-obsessed, which probably shaped younger readers a certain way. Wallace/Franzen in their own work reacting differently, as Updike & co did in their own time
Maybe I should have said he was dropped into the earth. There was a kind of sex obsession among many writers of that generation as there seems to be a dysfunctional family drama obsession among the Franzen generation.
@@jamesmorgan5671 There’s certainly nothing wrong with writing about sex, making your main character be obsessed with it, but when most of your books feature that kind of character and that obsession it’s boring. The edge, the novelty, plays out and the author seems like the kind of person who can think about nothing else. Whatever else that person is about is crowded out by the obsession. For me there are other lenses through which to portray the world and the people in it.
Excellent example. O’Hara was an excellent writer, particularly short stories. I thought his Appointment in Samara was very good and Butterfield 8 was made into a movie.
I read all the Rabbit books when they came out and liked them. I intended a re-read of them a few months ago. Rabbit Run still had some interest for me but I had forgotten what a complete asshole Rabbit was. I quit halfway through Rabbit Redux, his affair with the young hippie girl seemed unbelievable. I would still like to re-read Couples which was a big bestseller but is never talked about today. Updike craved to be relevant to a point that his stories today feel dated and a bit overwrought.
I had an almost identical reaction to Rabbit, Redux. Rabbit is Rich was more believable, but so focused on marriage and infidelity that it feels really dated now. Rabbit at Rest was ok I thought.
Unlike most of you, I was around when Updike published his first novel. (At least I think it was his first novel.) It would have been in the Fall of 1962, I was in my first year of Law School in Boston, and Updike was all the rage. For some reason I can't explain, the more people talked about him the less interested I was in him. I never read him. I did read Roth and loved his early work. Portnoy's Complaint makes me smile just thinking about it all these years later.. But Roth is not the only writer from that period who has faded from current memory. Does anyone talk about Michener, Herman Wouk Vance Bourjaily or even someone like Earl Stanley Gardner or Mickey Spillane ? And let's not forget some of the women writers such as Muriel Spark, Mary Stewart, and a favorite of mine, Joyce Elbert. If you think men were fixated on sex you should remember Miss Elbert whose Crazy Ladies, The Goddess Complex and Drunk in Madrid were once all the rage. And before her, Grace Metalious. with Peyton Place. Critical opinion and popular opinion never seem to be the same, and both are subject to enthusiasms that fade and sometimes revive over time. And there were a lot of memoirs by women writers that were more than frank about sex. But no one reads them any more either.
You so misread John Updike's writing missing the irony and the nuance. Updike's male characters are portrayed in their flaws. Women as well are shown with their own . Updike unforgettable? What did you say your name is?
You’re comment is fascinating. Where did I say Updike’s work lacked irony and nuance. Where did I say he was as a misogynist (though I believe he was in a mild but irritating way that lots of men of his generation were)? Where did I say his books should be forgotten? My entire video is a question: What happened to John Updike? (It’s the title). As a fan of Updike do you not feel like he has been largely forgotten by the literary world? Do you not think this might have something to do with his works obsession with se from the pov of white men?
Agree that the taboo was lifted so people were able to write what they thought about in regards to sex, right or wrong. It’s jarring now but was liberating at the time. I think it’s better to encourage that and keep stuff out in the open. Otherwise you have things like racism in the US where people had to hide it until recently and then lashed out. I’d rather know upfront that you’re a trash human being than having you slink around two faced trying to undermine me for years.
I have no desire to eliminate those things from books, but having so much attention and importance focused on sex seems odd now. Though as you point out it was new and important at the time.
I think it has more to do with the fact that there was a shift in who was buying and reading novels and that his work has a limited appeal to those readers.
My school library had two handsome first editions of Rabbit, Run and The Centaur. Alongside Madame Bovary, they were my absolute favorite books I read that year, the year I learned the true aesthetic potential of literature beyond the drudgery of the classroom. For that I’ll always hold those two Updike novels close to my heart.
That is the way I feel about Hemingway. His books were instrumental in my becoming a reader and I never fail to return back to the first time I read his books when I reread them.
Updike is the real deal. HIs short stories are best. Couples is good. In the Beauty of the Lilies is good. All of Rabbit is best. Don't bother with the Witches of Eastwick unless you want to. He wrote a surprise book called The Terrorist that needs to be read.
I enjoyed Updike quite a bit. Reading the Rabbit Angstrom books was a lot like reliving my own life as another person in another setting, admittedly, as an American male of roughly the same age. I was nothing like Rabbit but understood him. I will agree that that might not appeal to a lot of people but it did to me. Anybody who's read much fiction can probably feel a certain identity with one or more characters in a similar manner.
I went back and reread the "Rabbit" tetralogy about 10-years-ago and liked it even more than I'd remembered which is often not the case when I reread books from that far in the past. Updike does a good job of describing the background culture that his rich tapestry of characters are threading their way through, a period of about 40 years. The events weren't mind boggling dramatic but he made them feel authentic and believable. (Maybe I should shoehorn "verisimilitude" into this; but, it makes me feel too self-conscious and pretentious to try it 😉.) A dramatic accidental death of a child plus the mundane marital difficulties, dealings with in-laws, economic struggles, all that everyday stuff presented in a rather straightforward fashion has its appeal -- even the tv commercials were used to good effect. The one young black radical that took up with the Angstroms for a while which ended with their house burning down(?) might have been the biggest thing that happened in the whole series except for, of course, Rabbit's own death from a heart attack. But again, to use an overused term, it felt "real".
Updike likely won't be remembered as a great writer but he was a skilled, interesting, introspective, and highly intelligent writer. I have no idea if anybody will be reading him in a hundred years; but, I just wanted to say a good word about the music and the mothers from Nashville if you know what I mean. Another old fart probably needs to translate that for you. I'm up way too late as it is.
This is such a great comment. I like Updike less than you but your description of his work and his skills is pretty spot on. And I agree with your assessment of the future of his work as well.
I don't get the music and mothers from Nashville comment. Can anyone enlighten me?
@@katietatey It was nothing, Katie. I regretted it instantly when I looked at it the next morning. I know I could have edited it out but decided not to do it. It comes from the ending of an old song by the folk/rock group, The Loving Spoonful, called "Nashville Cats". The phrase has been used by, maybe, half a dozen people who have ever lived on planet Earth, to refer to an unexpected opportunity to comment on a subject that, in their eyes, popped up out of the blue. It doesn't even make good sense since it's obvious that the The Loving Spoonful set up their chance to comment by writing the song to begin with. Having said all that, the song is pleasant enough to get an old boomer's toes to tapping (sort of). We need all the circulation to the extremities that we can muster. Google it. You might like the tune. It's about as innocuous as you'll ever find.
This old fart will place John Updike among the greatest of american writers.
I should not have been drinking orange juice when you said your opening line. 😂
haha!!
I’ve read two Updikes - Rabbit, Run and Memories Of The Ford Administration. I was indifferent to Rabbit, Run and I think I took your advice that if one is underwhelmed by Rabbit, Run there’s no point in following it up with the rest of the series. Memories Of The Ford Administration remains one of the most pretentious novels I’ve ever read - so pretentious it boggled my mind: the section where a copulating couple is likened to a space station docking with its satellite stays in the mind as a real low for 20th century literature.
You make a good point about the MCMs - I somehow doubt Mailer’s reputation will ever recover, but I think Herzog and Henderson will keep Bellow’s name current in the future. They were indeed part of the first generation to be able to write frankly about sex and, being men, they naturally wrote about from a male perspective. They shouldn’t be called out for that.
Of all the writers considered to be mcm’s I like Bellow the most, though Augie March is my favorite
I have not read the Ford Admin book, but that description makes it sound awful.
I've read more than 3/4th of his body of work. Amazing style combined with amazing width of subjects. Updike is not only about sex, but also about family life, getting older, religion, society, morality etc.
I’m glad to know he still has a readership.
@@BookishTexanOh really? And how about your readership?
@@tomquinn607 You really got your feelings hurt about this video didn’t you.
I’m afraid I have never read anything by Updike, and for that matter, nor have I read Mailer, Roth or Bellow. I detect a yawning gap in my 20th century reading (one of many😢). I’m more a DeLillo kind of reader if that makes sense? I wonder if a similar obscurity is now where Martin Amis is heading. Death seems to be a bad career move for most novelists but is sometimes the making of rock musicians!
I like DeLillo more also. I’m not sure that the “yawning gap” is worth filling especially not with Mailer.
@@BookishTexan That's good to know!
So you say ...let's know literature in the myopic present tense. If you haven't read Updike then maybe we don't value your opinion about Updike.
@@tomquinn607 if you read carefully I do not express any opinion about Updike
Just read Terrorist, Updike’s 2006 effort at remaining relevant. It may not be perfect but it’s probably the best post 9/11 novel I’ve read so far.
Thank you for the recommendation
I meant to comment on this, but it was a busy week with the end of school.
Updike was definitely elevated as a poet and short story writer during my middle and high school education. My eighth grade grammar teacher bragged about meeting Updike . . .
I think you’re on point about how Updike’s readership was similar to his characters, and his long tenure as a critic at the New Yorker gave him a level of cachet.
I’ve honestly enjoyed his stories and his essays significantly more than any of his novels. The feelings and sentiments he focuses on, and his attention to detail work much better at that length than a verbose but thematically vacuous four hundred page novel.
Now the real question is, when are we doing a Jonesing for John Updike readathon?!?
Cheers, Jack
An Updike Read-a-thin might be fun. For a few books. I like some of his short stories. I’ve never read his poetry.
Good insight. I feel much the same about Hemingway. Loved his short stories. Probably will not read another of his novels.
Latin americans have discovered Cheever and Updike, and some groups of readers here in U.S. are getting a real grasp on this writers, why that is? In the last several decades many latin families went from working class to the middle, while whose became the upper-middle class and what happened was a downturn in their fortunes and what Updike and Cheever did was tell us what americans had been and were they were going, and both were at their best in the short story. Their work speaks to those that find themselves in the same delution of what money and better prospects in their career can do and what it can't! Many readers I've spoken to, have said that Updikes Rabbit tetralogy has more to say about being the all american people than anything written by Fitzgerald. Myself, I have always found parallels in the works of O'Hara, Updike, Cheever or even Capote in today's society, I believe we alway will!
Thank you for your great comment and insights. I had no idea that Latin Americans had begun reading Updike and the others. I certainly agree that O’Hara and Cheever were best in n their short stories. I’m not sure the message of their work about peoples future as Americans would necessarily be an optimistic one.
@@BookishTexan God, not optimistic! Repeating the same mistakes as they rise financially and the breakdown of the family unit, like my family, that are now living the result of the American dream, that living in the white picked fence with the dream about spouses and material comfort is not what's is cracked up to be. Never found any of these writers optimistic!
Out of Mailer, Updike, and Roth, Roth is the only one I still enjoy reading.
I tried to read American Pastoral and DNF’d it about halfway through. The writing was great but the story and characters felt stale and flat, o couldn’t stay interested.
well roth is definitely the most salacious
Out of Mailer, Updike and Roth, Updike wins hands down for me. And Updike is the least sexist of these three.
Updike is definitely part of that group of 20th century white blokes the BookTube has canceled. I read Rabbit, Run when I was in seminary and found it genuinely shocking, especially the ending which punched me in the gut. I burned through Redux and is Rich soon after and then he published Rabbit is Rest which my then girlfriend, now wife, bought for me in hardback. It was a big deal given that we were both students at the time. That I complained that it would not sit well on the shelf with my ratty paperbacks of the earlier novels was not the adoring expression of gratitude she might have expected. Not my finest moment.
I also read the first two Bech books and Couples, which is peak Updike. also Roger's Version, Marry Me and the collection Licks of Love which included the novella Rabbit Remembered.
For me Updike represents the late century American WASP. He presented a world where middle-aged people were 15 years into an unhappy second marriage. He seemed to be obsessed with women that were "wall-eyed," an expression that I had never heard. Everyone drank too much. It was utterly alien to me, a sheltered Jewish boy from London. And yet Rabbit, that high school hero turned mediocrity, felt entirely relatable. He is Amory Blaine and every other Fitzgerald disappointment. Like everyone else, I haven't read Updike for years, but he loomed large in my early life as a reader and the Rabbit books, written over 4 decades, will remain a key touchstone of literature of the time.
I think Updike was “cancelled” before widespread social media availability. But I agree with your description of the content of his work. Rabbit Run didn’t hit me the way it did you and I read the others out of inertia. Maybe I should have made Updike one of my accidental authors.
As far as cancelling I think it’s that his books cover subjects, characters that are just not of interest to readers the way they used to be. I think it’s fashion more than social justice. If he were being vilified his works would at least be read and discussed.
I read Highsmith’s _The Price of Salt._ The theme of sex (while not explicit) fit right in with what you were saying, and seemed an integral part of the literary milieu of the time. A lot of cocktails, a lot of lighting up cigarettes, that served no function, except the “verisimilitude” (to use another commenter’s word). I’ve never read Mailer but read about him, and he sounds that way; and while decades separate me from them I imagine Baldwin’s novels to be like that also.
Updike has seven volumes at Library of America: five compilations of novels, two of stories. So he should be remembered, but we can never predict posterity’s “take” can we? I haven’t read him-beyond the occasional review etc.-but it’s sure interesting to read people’s experiences here in the comments.
Baldwin’s books are not without sex, but I think you will find there is a difference in the role in which sex is used in plot and characterization.
I still need to read a Highsmith.
I won’t go back to Baldwin’s fiction; I always preferred his essays. Updike never appealed to me though I don’t mind a good sex scene. 🤪
I watched a rather famous interview/ confrontation between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show which took me down a bit of a rabbit hole which included John Updike. i found it really interesting that these guys, clearly in love with their own voices, were all the rage for a time but now seem to have become almost obscure. Funny how that's worked out. That didn't seem to happen to Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and others who might be considered the previous generation.
Sorry I appear to have gone off on a tangent
🤣
I have seen that too (I actually went down kind of wormhole watching old Dick Cavett episodes myself not long back). Great description of both Mailer and Vidal. Fitzgerald kind of disappeared for a while after his death then schools here started to teach The Great Gatsby. Hemingway's popularity has rises and falls but he stays present in the reading world I think. He was certainly no less a misogynist that Updike, Roth, etc. I suspect the prohibitions against writing directly about sex kind of saved him from making his work focus on it in the way that the midcentury fellas did.
I love a good tangent.
I don’t get the hoopla of misogyny around Roth and Updike. They were basically writing about the urban American male and his dynamics with the corresponding society at the time. They just wrote what they experienced first hand with a bit exaggeration and dramatic flair. And by some of today’s standards almost all straight urban American males of 60s and 70s would be called misogynists. I find it bewildering when people expect a piece of mainstream fiction of a certain time as some pamphlet of author’s personal views and ethics. P.S: almost everyone in my fathers generation who reads is a huge Updike or a Roth fan. So clearly they were hitting a chord with them big time.
I just talked about Updike with someone and we talked about many of the same things. From my point of view they are clearly misogynists but that isn’t a reason not to read them. They were products of the culture at the time. I read a great deal of Updike in the 80s&90s and enjoyed some of it, but now it just feels like an exaggerated description of life in the 50s&60s that has no real relevance or depth. What seemed profound in their work no longer seems that way to me. Updike’s work has no or little about it that will last.
I believe that any artist's reputation is not truly established until at least fifty years after their death. Today Johann Sebastian Bach is considered one of the greatest composers ever. Yet, his music fell out of regard after his death. It was not until 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn mounted a performance of St. Matthew's Passion and more or less reintroduced Bach's music to the public did Bach's music once more start to be heard with any sort of regularity. If one compares Baroque music with music from the Romantic era of Beethoven, they are very dissimilar. One came into fashion while the other fell out of it. Fashion is the key word. I believe "what happened" with John Updike has nothing to do with his value as an author. Rather, I believe that society has changed and the shift in moral attitudes has temporarily left Updike behind.
I have only read Rabbit Run by Updike so I cannot speak to his entire oeuvre. In that book I found the character of Harry Angstrom repellent. However, as a reader, I do not read books to have my own attitudes reinforced. Whenever I find something I read challenging, I consider the validity of my own beliefs rather than assuming my way of thinking is the only way to go. I love challenges in the books I read. If there are none, I feel cheated. With Rabbit Run I was appalled by attitudes and behaviors. However, I recognized right off the bat that Updike was not presenting a personal view of the world. He was chronicling the society as it existed in reality. That's what authors do. They are historians in the realm of literary fiction. I am seventy-four years-old. I knew people that were like the characters in Rabbit Run. I may not have been an adult but I remember vividly hearing adults around me discussing key parties. I remember when the local Shriners Club made headlines when they got caught having key parties. If what I read is required to support my own views of life, I'd have precious few books to read.
Today's man can say he is more aware than men back in the heyday of when Updike wrote his books. Yet, in spite of all the awakening that's gone on in today's man's consciousness, he is still like a horny teenager looking for something or someone to score. Being truly aware is admitting the bad with the good. Right here, right now John Updike may be considered a has been or a never was author. But, time and attitudes are continuously in flux. Just because society feels one way today does not have much bearing on what society feels in the future. I suspect Updike will experience a re-examination as an artist as did Bach. Criticism based upon personal opinions does not serve the arts. What we are experiencing as a society today is a fragility of the self. It can't last.
So great to here from you. It has been some time. Thank you for the excellent comment. I don’t disagree with much of what you wrote.
Your point about artists and authors going in and out of fashion is well made. There is no telling which author from Updike’s generation will experience a renaissance. My guess it is that it will more likely be Bellow and/or Roth than Updike. In a way I think Updike’s productivity will harm him. But perhaps, like Balzac it will cement a permanent place for him.
For me the sex obsessed work of Updike and Company ages poorly not because of the sex, but because it seems so juvenile. Rabbit Angstrom I think proves this. It mirrors the rather immature attitude of the time we’ll, but I don’t think that will serve Updike or the others well. People will always be interested in sex, but I doubt that in the future the way sex is portrayed in Updike will be appealing. It’s not prudery, I think, but maturity or maybe sophistication is a better term.
Updike, Baldwin and Roth are my favorite writers. I'm reading Bellow again - Dean's December.
I have only made it through one Roth, Goodbye Columbus. Got bored with American Pastoral. I may try another of his books next year.
Try The Human Stain and The Plot Against America. Plot Against first if you have the choice.@@BookishTexan
I read the Rabbit novels and a few others. Good, but not great books. His star power as an author has definitely faded since I first read him in the 80s. But I’m not so sure any current authors who have replaced him will retain their star power either decades from now.
You may be correct, though I suspect a few whose careers overlapped his a bit might.
Great discussion! I lump Updike in the category of authors I was regularly assigned to read in my MFA creative writing workshops. Mid-to-late 20th century American white authors of the realist tradition. I think if we had been assigned a wider variety of fiction to read (and emulate), I wouldn't be so sick of authors like Updike today! Too bad for Updike! Thanks for the great video.
That may be what happened to me only more voluntarily. I read a bunch of the msm writers in my twenties, Updike among them. I tried to read Roth’s American Pastoral last year and found it pretty lifeless, like I had read a version of it before, and I DNF’d it half way through.
Oh. Are we writing by color now? For dipwads like you who are blind to art?
During Updike's lifetime, New York was the US center for publishing and media. I suggest that Updike's popularity was enhanced because the media elite deemed him the golden boy of writers. So he was regularly published by the New Yorker and NY Review of Books.
The book industry public relations department promotes writers like General Mills promotes Cheerios. His popularity was manufactured and boosted in an artificial way. He seemed more popular than he was.
These are really good insights and things I had not considered (other than the New Yorker). This explains a lot about why his popularity dropped off so quickly.
“The Witches of Eastwick” was a thoroughly enjoyable read for me. I am bracing myself for any possible videos on Philip Roth( the greatest writer of all time). 😃 I acknowledge that Roth’s writing includes sexual fixations, however I would argue against claiming that is his main focus. Two of his best novels( in my opinion) “The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America” are eerily prescient. I know you DNF’D “American Pastoral” 😱, but I urge you to read these two books.
I certainly haven't read enough Roth to judge him. If I try another of his books it will certainly be a direct result of your lobbying.
Thanks Joni.
Updike can be delicious, when read selectively. I liked his early short stories (A&P was one), The Centaur, Rabbit, Run (though slightly less), and The Witches of Eastwick, and then Brasil less so again. He was always brilliant but his suburban sexual fixations demonstrated his narrowness, even provinciality for me. Yet he may have been a genius; in an interview on PBS years ago I noted he spoke, not just in perfect sentences but in entire, finished paragraphs, and not previously rehearsed answers but as original thoughts wonderfully articulated. Our own Nabokov, in a way, maybe.
I have enjoyed some of his stories. He was a very smart man and capable of great wit and some great writing.
Surely Nabokov qualifies as an honorary American ?? So it appears from this side of the Atlantic.. I may be wrong. ?
Can we think of him as Russian...
@@2msvalkyrie529Very well, he's ours too!
In the Eighties, I had some friends who worshipped him. I read a couple of books and thought mostly that they were just dull. Most literary figures fade away. With someone like Updike, his best chance of maintaining a reputation would be to get taught in school. Not a chance for secondary school, and I think most colleges would have passed him by, even if we were not seeing a major push in colleges for “inclusivity.”
I agree the key to longevity for most writers is to find their way onto academic course reading lists. I think our assessments of his work are the same for the most part.
well at least updike wrote books that were both readable and enjoyable to read unlike wallace's fiction infinite jest is something I can only use as a doorstop
That is an excellent point. Thanks Frank.
The only Updike novel I've read is The Centaur. It was assigned in a college class. I haven't thought of that book in years! It was meh for me although it did win the National Book Award. I've never been interested in reading more Updike.
I have that one and started reading it once but didn’t get far.
Never an Updike fan but most of my favorite writers have gone out of favor. Henry Miller. Anais Nin. Tom McGuane. Jim Harrison. Larry McMurtry,. John Irving. I could probably keep going and I know they're almost all men but that's just off the top of my head. Hemmingway seems to have made a bit of a comeback. He went out of favor for a few decades.
I think the PBS special on Hemingway probably helped revitalize him a bit. Having Edna O’Brien argue that he wasn’t a misogynist probably helped.
I'd never heard of Updike before this video. I guess he was mostly before my time. I was born in 1988. I also don't read very many novels. It wouldn't occur to me to read a novel about men's sex lives in the 1960s. I sort of understand why that would be considered an intellectual topic, but I sort of don't.
I think your comment is exactly what Davide Foster Wallace was getting at. Updike's work were products of a very specific time and cultural moment and their focus is not very appealing to readers anymore.
Thanks Melissa
I'm inclined to dislike Updike by and large, though I like some of his short stories. Oof, reading Rabbit, Run was a painful and triggering experience that still makes me wince. His favorite subject matter overall seems a kind of indulgent narcissism fed and watered by the long postwar prosperity (for the straight, white male). Less interesting Mad Men characters. I'd run into his criticism et al. in the New Yorker, and he could of course write beautifully but I think he sometimes wrote lyrically for lyricism's sake, imparting empty calories to his sentences. I'd reckon he's not much missed except maybe by David Remnick.
Great assessment Marian!
Sometimes he seemed to write just because he could and knew it would be published. I hadn’t thought of Remnick missing him🤓
@@BookishTexan ha! well, a writer's gotta eat. I doubt he could live too high on the hog off his novels, prolific and fairly widely read as he was.
I have an embarrassing confession... I own every single one of Updike's books. And I've read all of them except I haven't finished all his volumes of literary criticism (there are 6 and they are dense). My Dad was a big Updike fan and I'd read the Rabbit books in high school as well as a few others that I really liked. I don't know why I loved Rabbit, Run so much, but there was something about Harry that just seemed very real to me. I didn't like him, he was a total a-hole, but he reminded me of men I know. Anyway, I tend to be someone who collects things and also someone who tries to read everything by an author. I have everything published by a few authors, but Updike was so prolific! During the pandemic, I started collecting more and more of his books and then I decided to get all of them. I guess it's like people who collect all of Stephen King's books... there are a lot! It turns out that I liked his short stories and his books that were about relationships like Marry Me, Couples, The Centaur, Villages, and Too Far to Go the best. There were a number of books that I didn't particularly like at all (The Coup, Terrorist, Toward the End of Time, Seek My Face) but I kept reading them anyway because I was on a mission. It's 63 books in total, by the way (including a few volumes of poetry and some art criticism). I just checked. Totally embarrassing. :)
No reason to ever be embarrassed. He was a good writer. I just didn’t like most of his plots or characters. I think it’s amazing that you read all of his books. You definitely have a better foundation from which to assess him than I do.
Thanks as always Katie.
That is super impressive!
When I was young each Updike book published seemed to be a big deal, and I read a lot of them. 25+ years ago I read the four Rabbit books and enjoyed them a lot. Not sure I would as much anymore. I think the most recent I have read is In the Beauty of the Lilies, which you mention. I found it quite good. Roger's Version is another that I recall liking a lot. But you are correct in that he and others such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, etc. are not too much talked about these days. The biggest Roth news since his death was about his biographer having been accused of something or other negative involving a woman. Updike is notably a WASP and these other three are Jewish male writers (I think Mailer is; Roth and Bellow definitely). They are all definitely worth reading, and Roth is a particular favorite of mine. But yes, nowadays that subject matter provokes a little controversy.
Updike could write very well and he was capable of creating funny and poignant scenes. Mailer is, I think the most forgotten (deservedly so), Roth the one who I think is still most likely to survive, and Bellow the best, I think, of those you listed. Don DeLillo is my favorite of those I think. His novel Underworld is amazing.
There are timeless lessons to be learned from Updike's fiction. Perhaps the negative reviewers have failed to comprehend.
It’s possible. It’s also possible those sane lessons can be picked up by reading the works of others.
@@BookishTexan Life's lessons are pretty much universal. All writers are basically dealing with the same material, but I can't think of a writer who said it more eloquently than Updike. For that he's panned?
@@jeffrey3498 I have nothing against your reverence for Updike, I just don’t share it.
It's so funny looking at history how there's a lot of authors famous or infamous in their lifetime and forgotten or in the margins afterward and others who hsve no noteriety in their life and explosion after.
The disappearing writer is an odd phenomenon. I think it will become even more common since writers really aren’t public intellectuals anymore.
@@BookishTexanExactly my thoughts. My god if you look back, people like Updike, Mailer, Vidal were basically high profile celebrities of their time. Appearing on talks shows, swooned by the entertainment industry etc. How quickly did the digital age has changed all that😅
Funny, people can't see the forest for the trees. If you have mixed feelings about him, you still have feelings. There is a response. That's all you need to be relevant. He made art that mattered. So. Personally, I'll give him a shot. I'm going to try Rabbit, Run and see how it goes in 2023.
I hope you enjoy Rabbit, Run.
I think it’s the lack of memorable scenes in his work that weakens his legacy.
@@BookishTexan btw I appreciate the spoiler-less review. sheesh I clicked a few I wish I didn't. still think it should be a good read I appreciate the content. subscribed!
@@justinphilipnash Thanks! I do hope you like it. If this is your first Updike I think you picked the right place to start.
I have read Updike, many years ago, and I could not tell you what those books were about. I just can't remember much about them, which is probably enough of a review.
That’s is pretty much what I think as well. I had to do some real thinking to recall the plots of the books I mentioned.
Thanks I appreciate this. For me as a reader, the Rabbit books (all of them) absolutely nail ONE aspect of American social-economic circumstances during those times. I've read about 5-6 other books and they were just really not interesting. If I say he shot his literary wad on the Rabbit books is that appropriate?
HA!
Not sure if its appropriate in one sense, but it certainly fits the theme of many of Updike's books. Thanks for watching and commenting.
I just found Updike's novels boring. I always liked him when I heard him interviewed and I like his critical wriiting. I was in college in the early 1970s (yes, I'm old) and I was assigned Updike, Mailer, Bellow, etc. I'm overgeneralizing in a big way here buit it seemed to me that many of these books included disregard and mistreatment of women Then the male protagonist would spend some part of the narrative wondering why women didn't like him. I always wondered if the authors realized their male characters were a-holes.
Thank you for the great comment.
I kind of think they knew their characters were a-holes but still thought that’s the way men were and there was no changing them. There books do seem boring to me, though there are a few Bellow books that I like.
I also find it very odd that he fell off the face of the Earth after his death :-) well, I guess he did, literally, but his regard… I find a lot of American authors back then sex-obsessed, which probably shaped younger readers a certain way. Wallace/Franzen in their own work reacting differently, as Updike & co did in their own time
Maybe I should have said he was dropped into the earth.
There was a kind of sex obsession among many writers of that generation as there seems to be a dysfunctional family drama obsession among the Franzen generation.
Why is fixating on sex a flaw? It's not like it isn't a central driving force of all human life.
@@jamesmorgan5671 There’s certainly nothing wrong with writing about sex, making your main character be obsessed with it, but when most of your books feature that kind of character and that obsession it’s boring. The edge, the novelty, plays out and the author seems like the kind of person who can think about nothing else. Whatever else that person is about is crowded out by the obsession. For me there are other lenses through which to portray the world and the people in it.
I wonder if John Updike will go the way of John O'Hara? O'Hara was a big deal when he was alive. When he died he just faded away.
Excellent example. O’Hara was an excellent writer, particularly short stories. I thought his Appointment in Samara was very good and Butterfield 8 was made into a movie.
@@BookishTexan Actually, he seems to be making a comeback.
I read all the Rabbit books when they came out and liked them. I intended a re-read of them a few months ago. Rabbit Run still had some interest for me but I had forgotten what a complete asshole Rabbit was. I quit halfway through Rabbit Redux, his affair with the young hippie girl seemed unbelievable. I would still like to re-read Couples which was a big bestseller but is never talked about today. Updike craved to be relevant to a point that his stories today feel dated and a bit overwrought.
I had an almost identical reaction to Rabbit, Redux. Rabbit is Rich was more believable, but so focused on marriage and infidelity that it feels really dated now. Rabbit at Rest was ok I thought.
Unlike most of you, I was around when Updike published his first novel. (At least I think it was his first novel.) It would have been in the Fall of 1962, I was in my first year of Law School in Boston, and Updike was all the rage. For some reason I can't explain, the more people talked about him the less interested I was in him. I never read him. I did read Roth and loved his early work. Portnoy's Complaint makes me smile just thinking about it all these years later.. But Roth is not the only writer from that period who has faded from current memory. Does anyone talk about Michener, Herman Wouk Vance Bourjaily or even someone like Earl Stanley Gardner or Mickey Spillane ? And let's not forget some of the women writers such as Muriel Spark, Mary Stewart, and a favorite of mine, Joyce Elbert.
If you think men were fixated on sex you should remember Miss Elbert whose Crazy Ladies, The Goddess Complex and Drunk in Madrid were once all the rage. And before her, Grace Metalious. with Peyton Place. Critical opinion and popular opinion never seem to be the same, and both are subject to enthusiasms that fade and sometimes revive over time. And there were a lot of memoirs by women writers that were more than frank about sex. But no one reads them any more either.
Thanks for the reminders of other authors of or before Updike’s generation. I have read some of them but not all of them.
Yes. " Valley of the Dolls " is
superior in many ways to just about anything by Updike !
You so misread John Updike's writing missing the irony and the nuance. Updike's male characters are portrayed in their flaws. Women as well are shown with their own . Updike unforgettable? What did you say your name is?
You’re comment is fascinating. Where did I say Updike’s work lacked irony and nuance. Where did I say he was as a misogynist (though I believe he was in a mild but irritating way that lots of men of his generation were)? Where did I say his books should be forgotten?
My entire video is a question: What happened to John Updike? (It’s the title). As a fan of Updike do you not feel like he has been largely forgotten by the literary world? Do you not think this might have something to do with his works obsession with se from the pov of white men?
its because they are both named john, but i always get updike and irving mixed up.
I can see that.
Agree that the taboo was lifted so people were able to write what they thought about in regards to sex, right or wrong. It’s jarring now but was liberating at the time.
I think it’s better to encourage that and keep stuff out in the open. Otherwise you have things like racism in the US where people had to hide it until recently and then lashed out.
I’d rather know upfront that you’re a trash human being than having you slink around two faced trying to undermine me for years.
I have no desire to eliminate those things from books, but having so much attention and importance focused on sex seems odd now. Though as you point out it was new and important at the time.
Sadly, political correctness and wokeness has damaged his great legacy.
I think it has more to do with the fact that there was a shift in who was buying and reading novels and that his work has a limited appeal to those readers.
🐇🐰🐇