John Updike 1932-2009

March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

John Updike died today. He was 76.

I could write a lot about him. I have read almost all of his books. I bought and read every one of his novels. He was one of only a few writers that I would buy the new novel at its release without looking at a review and just read it.

My wife was also an Updike reader, so his novels were frequently a birthday gift for one of us.

I never got to teach any of his novels. I did regularly teach some of his poems and one of his early short stories, "A&P," that was in an anthology I used. It was a good adolescent tale of a boy who works in a supermarket who creates a moral dilemma for himself when the store's owner confronts three bikini-clad teenage girls who appear at his checkout station.

It's a simple story about a kid who takes a stand for something he believes is right and receives no praise or recognition for it.

My favorite works by him are his short stories.

I also like Updike's poetry which never received much attention. His most anthologized poem is probably "Ex-Basketball Player" but it's not really the best representation of his poetry or what he has written in the half century since it was published.

On my Poets Online blog we used an Updike poem back in January 2006 as a writing prompt.

It was the poem "Dog's Death" from his Collected Poems 1953-1993.

I mentioned on the site that it's not sentimental, or comforting, or funny and wise. It's about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, and that desire (thankfully) many of us seem to have (as in "A&P") to do the "right thing." I also see it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" which you can read at this NPR site which is part of a series called "The End of Life: Exploring Death in America."

I met him twice at readings. The first time, I was a new college grad and carried the original paperback edition of his story collection Pigeon Feathers to get signed. He asked me how I had come to own it, since I was too young to have bought it new.

I told him that I bought it in a used book store and showed him a note that was inside the book when I bought it. The note was scribbled on back of an airport receipt for the book's purchase. "call. pick up boxes," it said. There was also a paycheck stub. "There's the start of a story," Updike said. I replied that I actually had written a story from that idea. He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. "I'd like to see it," he said.

I mailed him the story and a week later received a postcard reply typed on a manual typewriter. It's as close to having something in The New Yorker as I have ever come.

It saddens me that John Updike never received the Nobel Prize in Literature during his lifetime. What a lifetime body of work - more than twenty-five novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, non-fiction including art criticism, literary criticism, children's books, and hundreds of stories, reviews, and poems in The New Yorker where he first was accepted in 1954.

"Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise."
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Books by John Updike

The Two Updikes

I have been an Updike reader since high school when I started reading John Updike's short stories. I bought all the available collections in used bookstores.



I reread the collected The Maples Stories years later. It has 18 stories from across about 40 years of his career that together make a kind of complete story of one marriage and the American times it spanned. They were released in a paperback version (Too Far to Go) when a television adaptation was done.

It started back in 1956 when John Updike published the story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. For the next couple of decades, he occasionally returned to those characters. Raising children, some happiness, some unhappiness, finally infidelity and estrangement.

I read many of these stories in The New Yorker. I would check the index of new issues at the library to see if he had a new story. I also looked at what poems were in the issue - sometimes he published poems too.

The collection added a later story, “Grandparenting,” that I had never read which takes place long after their divorce.

I started reading his son, David Updike, when his book of stories, Out on the Marsh, came out (1989). It's a good collection that seems to be out of print.

It has to be a tough job being a writer when your father is already about as big as they get in the writing world. David is about my age and did some teaching, so I felt some affinity for him. I liked what I read of a eulogy that he delivered for his father at the New York Public Library’s tribute back in March.

He published several young adult and children's books that I was able to find at bookstores over the years. A Winter Journey, An Autumn Tale, A Spring Story, and The Sounds of Summer make a great seasonal suite for young readers. They follow a boy named Homer and his dog Sophocles through the seasons. Unfortunately, they seem to be seem to be out of print.


His second collection of stories is Old Girlfriends.

"Love Songs from America" might be a somewhat autobiographical tale of an American father bringing his biracial son, Harold, to his wife's Kenyan homeland.

I liked "Adjunct" right from the title since I have been an adjunct instructor. David has taught English and Creative Writing at MIT and Roxbury Community College in Boston.


Old Girlfriends shouldn't be read to be compared with his father's stories, though I imagine most reviewers will point out similarities like the New England settings and themes of marriage, relationships, affairs and such. David's stories seem simple and more about everyday life, but they do deal with family and love and race that his father also explored.

I like that he seems to like his characters, even the ones that he and we probably shouldn't like as much. If writers don't like the characters, readers never will like them.



I know of one book that the two collaborated on - A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects - a picture book for children consisting of 26 short poems on the letters of the alphabet by John Updike with photographs by David Updike.

Updike on Rabbit

His given name is Harold Angstrom, but everyone knew him as "Rabbit" including the millions of readers who have read any of all of John Updike's books Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. (plus a novella, "Rabbit Remembered")

The books follow Rabbit through his lifetime, but much of its appeal probably came from the time periods that make up the settings of each novel and the portrait of middle-class American men and families in that time.

Rabbit was nothing heroic His glory days were always back on a high school basketball court. He's an everyman, the little guy.

His wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and several women (particularly Ruth and Jill) accompany Rabbit on his journey - but Rabbit does run.

In this clip from 1997 , Updike talks about Rabbit with Charlie Rose.

A Few Good Reads

I started using Good Reads back in 2008. It is a website that let's you see what your friends are reading and keep track of what you've read (which I have always tried to do in the back of my journals, but it was never shared), write reviews for others, and chronicle what you plan to read (more important to me in these increasingly forgetful days).

Since it's also a social network, you can find new "friends" and get book recommendations from them. It also has book trivia games, literary quotes and other stuff.

Two of my first posts on GoodReads.com were of books written by Nicholson Baker.


U and I: A True Story
by Nicholson Baker

I picked it up because I like his writing AND I like John Updike who is the "subject" of the book. Baker has a bit of an Updike obsession. I'm not sure that fans of Baker or Updike will like it for those reasons.

I did. Of course, know that I also made a drive once in my undergrad days to Cornish, NH to try to see or connect with J.D. Salinger, so I know something of his book's landscape.




The Fermata by Nicholson Baker

Another book of Baker's that I really enjoyed and could "identify with" (as much as that is possible in this case).

This is the story of Arno Strine who has "fold-powers." Arno can stop time and continue to walk around and interact with the world. This was one of my boyhood fantasies (along with flying and being able to become invisible whenever I wanted to).

He doesn't get evil with his power but he does do some rather immature boyish things like undress women (but in a "loving way"). It's not sci-fi in the true sci-fi way but his "chronanisms" are fantastic and literary beyond my own boyhood fantasies.

Thanks for writing the book for me, Mr. Baker.


FACTOID:  A fermata is a musical notation indicating that the note should be sustained for longer than its note value would indicate. Exactly how much longer it is held is up to the discretion of the performer or conductor.

Updike and Cheever

Dick Cavett writes a blog for The New York Times. He blogged about when he had interviewed John Updike and John Cheever on the same show and that has led them to offer the complete version of that show from 1981.

Here is a link to the video

Long Literary Sentences

What is the longest sentence in literature?

One of the longest sentences in literature is certainly in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). That sentence is composed of 1,288 words and is Quentin Compson’s silent thoughts.

“There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.” — Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922) is also a consideration at 3,687 words, but I knock this one out because it really is just a bunch of sentences without punctuation. Joyce was known for "stream of consciousness," which was quite a popular stylistic device in the 1920s and 30s. It made those run-on sentences that your English teacher marked you down for on compositions legitimate. At least, that was the line I used on my tenth-grade English teacher, Mr. Reece, who replied that "Those writers know the rules, so now they can break them."

Victor Hugo has a nice 800-plus line in Les Misérables.

John Updike was very careful with his sentences, but he used a few unusually long ones across his many novels. Here's an example from Rabbit, Run.

“But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.”

In Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home,” she has a long one full of commas. I can see why she wants it to run fast as a sentence, but you could easily make some of the commas into periods and it would work just as well.

"I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…"

This extremely long sentence became a kind of literary game. Two examples that seem more like a gimmick to me.

Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955-word sentence.

French writer Mathias Énard has a one-sentence novel, Zone, that is 517 pages long with only 23 chapter breaks to help you avoid going completely insane while reading.