John Updike

huh

Its about the same as it was in the 90s and 00s, only thing that has changed is that a pathetic meme killed Updike threads on IQfy.

He's despised by the current literati, probably more popular here than in the culture at large.
He's about as far from the Current Thing as possible. White straight middle class man writing about himself, the suburbs, heterosexuality. He didn't even have the basic decency to be israeli or Catholic.

It starts out okay but goes off the rails. Casting is great though. It's literally a Goerge Miller film btw

Anything DFW can do, a modern millennial woman can do better.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

Anything DFW can do, a modern millennial woman can do better.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

>penis with a thesaurus

such a brutal insult. that essay ruined updike’s reputation.

I used to agree with DFW's assessment of Toward the End of Time, and still think Updike could have cut down on all the suburban adultery-sex (considering it is his foray into science fiction) but re-reading it I actually came to really like Updike's approach to the inner sense of time. After the COVID lock down, the character's experience of the passage of time seems prescient almost.

Also, I've come to think that Updike, though a bit icy and narcissistic, is actually more honest with himself about how he views women than Wallace is. Just look at how women write about Wallace bros today. The whole New Sincerity shtick didn't seem to quell the battle of the sexes. In fact, things are worse now.

>The Centaur
I thought it was about an actual centaur and got excited. Then I saw it was some realist bullshit about anxiety and depression. Oh well.

Harlot's Ghost and Ancient Evenings.
People obviously like The Naked and the Dead but it definitely feels like a first book. I enjoyed it greatly at the time, but it didn't hold up reading it last year.

>Only Nabokov, Updike and Gore have stood the test of time
Nabby is essentially an English writing Russian. Gore? You mean Gore Vidal? He's in a worse place than Roth

Held up from my perspective. Nobody reads Gore Vidal anymore.
Although you'd think he'd have all the credentials necessary.

Nabokov was a Russian born American novelist for the greater part of his career. No way e-girlta is a Russian novel; it’s written in English by an author living in America and set in America

I suppose I am although people like Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway are all writers I respect more than I actually like.
I think American literature had an overall good influence on the rest of the world but it's something I find difficult to digest. It's too heavy and there's too much of it.

The Europeans just had more of an effect on me for some reason.

>That being said, it is frustrating that Updike, for all of his talent, did not write any other truly groundbreaking and innovative novel. It would have been interesting to see what Updike could have come up with if he have devote several years to a single work (in the manner of Pynchon or Joyce)

He is possibly, next to Nabokov and perhaps Waugh, the greatest prose stylist in English in the second half of the 20th century.

Besides the Rabbit series, his novels are probably his weakest point actually. As others have stated in this thread it is remarkable how much his reputation has fallen in the eyes of the literary establishment.

Nonetheless, I think one could make a fairly compelling argument that he is the greatest of the post WWII writers in America based on the fact that he wrote literary criticism, novels, poetry, and, of course short stories -- all at a very high level. Some on this board likely see him as thematically light compared to McCarthy or Pynchon, and not as innovative as them, but McCarthy and Pynchon were limited almost entirely to novels. So they at least equal out I suppose

>As others have stated in this thread it is remarkable how much his reputation has fallen in the eyes of the literary establishment.

Updike never seemed one for the ambitious “novel of ideas”. I think this is a big part of the sudden seeming critical disavowal of him. He’s not one for the grand philosophical novel of ideas (whether a Dostoevskian one, or in the later modernist and postmodernist veins), and he’s also not one for revolutionizing the very structure of the novel itself (as the avant-garde modernists and postmodernists tried to do).

But for all this, his books are still some of the most astonishing, beautiful, and talented examples of “fiction-for-fiction’s-sake” I’ve ever yet read (to rehash Wilde’s old phrase). No criticism or summary can ever really encapsulate how breathtakingly beautiful his writing can be. Leaving aside all ratings of “philosophicality” and “how much he expanded the barriers of fiction (or experimentality),” I’d rate him one of the greatest English-language stylists of the 20th-century, up there with heavyweights like Joyce and Nabokov. But Updike was, again, more concerned with refining the realistic English-language novel (mostly within the basic constraints laid out from Flaubert to James) to its peak, and panoramically depicting mid-to-late 20th-century American upper-middle-class suburban life than he was with this aforementioned philosophicality [sic] or experimentality, hence his (somewhat marred) critical reputation. He’s, in all honesty, a bit too regional — writers like Faulkner and Joyce were also TECHNICALLY and GEOGRAPHICALLY extremely regional (limited to the American Deep South and Dublin, Ireland respectively) but they worked in enough universal philosophical themes, as well as with aforementioned “experimentality” that pushed the limits of the novel, enough to outgrow their regionalism.

>curiously
Why do you find that curious? Rabbit Run from the technique standpoint is largely the work of a naive writer doing ignorant imitation, he had yet to build the skill and understanding of his own influences or his own writing to effectively combine those influences into a cohesive style which leaves it somewhat ragged. The maturation you speak of is the development of his style and as he become more comfortable and knowledgeable about his style and its influences he became more capable with that style and was able to accomplish more with it. In Rabbit Run he is limited by his own ignorance, his style is something he must work within or lose the reader, as time goes on his style becomes something more fluid and something he can push and even leave in a way that will not leave the reader lost. The Rabbit series does a great job of showing the development of his style.

Coincidentally, I was just going to mention this: how beautiful the Rabbit Tetralogy is for showing Updike’s style progressing and maturing as he writes it. Even by itself, “Rabbit, Run” is a great and above-average novel, but I feel his novels get better with (almost) every one, “Rabbit is Rich” being my personal favorite and seeming the finest of the tetralogy.

The original appeal was just the feeling of his fiction. It was light and free and still obviously extremely well made. It also obviously had something to do with working and middle class life, and not in the slightly romanticized way you get from Zola or Ibsen, all the chest pounding pornographic tone of some of the American writers. He had that gift for holding up regular things and turning them about until they catch the Light.

Only later did I get a feel for his style and realized what an exceptional talent he was.

> Is philosophy and experimentation even important in fiction? Jane Austen has outlasted all her contemporaries and you have to squint very hard to get philosophy or innovation out of her. Does it come down to 'its the story, stupid'

Yeah, in my post

>That being said, it is frustrating that Updike, for all of his talent, did not write any other truly groundbreaking and innovative novel. It would have been interesting to see what Updike could have come up with if he have devote several years to a single work (in the manner of Pynchon or Joyce)

[...]
>As others have stated in this thread it is remarkable how much his reputation has fallen in the eyes of the literary establishment.

Updike never seemed one for the ambitious “novel of ideas”. I think this is a big part of the sudden seeming critical disavowal of him. He’s not one for the grand philosophical novel of ideas (whether a Dostoevskian one, or in the later modernist and postmodernist veins), and he’s also not one for revolutionizing the very structure of the novel itself (as the avant-garde modernists and postmodernists tried to do).

But for all this, his books are still some of the most astonishing, beautiful, and talented examples of “fiction-for-fiction’s-sake” I’ve ever yet read (to rehash Wilde’s old phrase). No criticism or summary can ever really encapsulate how breathtakingly beautiful his writing can be. Leaving aside all ratings of “philosophicality” and “how much he expanded the barriers of fiction (or experimentality),” I’d rate him one of the greatest English-language stylists of the 20th-century, up there with heavyweights like Joyce and Nabokov. But Updike was, again, more concerned with refining the realistic English-language novel (mostly within the basic constraints laid out from Flaubert to James) to its peak, and panoramically depicting mid-to-late 20th-century American upper-middle-class suburban life than he was with this aforementioned philosophicality [sic] or experimentality, hence his (somewhat marred) critical reputation. He’s, in all honesty, a bit too regional — writers like Faulkner and Joyce were also TECHNICALLY and GEOGRAPHICALLY extremely regional (limited to the American Deep South and Dublin, Ireland respectively) but they worked in enough universal philosophical themes, as well as with aforementioned “experimentality” that pushed the limits of the novel, enough to outgrow their regionalism.

[...]
Coincidentally, I was just going to mention this: how beautiful the Rabbit Tetralogy is for showing Updike’s style progressing and maturing as he writes it. Even by itself, “Rabbit, Run” is a great and above-average novel, but I feel his novels get better with (almost) every one, “Rabbit is Rich” being my personal favorite and seeming the finest of the tetralogy.

I didn’t make it clear enough that I was more recounting what seems behind him falling out of favor by critics, not necessarily just my own views. I still love the novels for all that he has a different outlook and aim than the grandiosely philosophical and/or experimental writers of the 20th-century who seem to get even more critical acclaim.

>"Rabbit is Rich” being my personal favorite and seeming the finest of the tetralogy.
Sort of jumped the shark with the wife swapping I thought. Felt a bit sensational.

Jumping the shark is what Updike does, but you forgive him because of how beautifully written it is. The Rabbit tetralogy reads like a demented sitcom at times. Rabbit Redux with the whole Skeeter-Jill-Nelson storyline was hilariously over-the-top, I guess as Updike’s commentary on what he saw as the excesses of the 60s youth counterculture. You get the sense that Updike himself is a cheerfully, secretly somewhat deranged person for even writing some of this. And if you want more wife-swapping, Couples is explicitly centered around that.

I agree with you that Updike's aestheticism is likely a large part of why his critical reception has waned in recent years. His aestheticism poses difficulties for the academy; they don't lend themselves to being taught in the conventional manner of literary analysis characteristic of literature departments.

> to its peak, and panoramically depicting mid-to-late 20th-century American upper-middle-class suburban life.

I can sense that we are in agreement that, when we say that Updike is one of the great stylists, we are not merely marveling at his technical precision and the beauty of his language, but admiring his almost preternatural ability to transmit finer, seemingly ineffable, shades of experience into a unified aesthetic/literary experience. It brings to mind Nabokov's concept of "aesthetic bliss." I raise this point because Updike's detractors sometimes seem to be under the impression that those who admire Updike do so merely because they see him as a highly skilled craftsman, a technician of sorts. Which he of course is, but there is something else his work is accomplishing that is difficult to pinpoint. Besides the Rabbit series, what are some novels of Updike that strike you as particularly beautiful?

>Besides the Rabbit series, what are some novels of Updike that strike you as particularly beautiful?
I liked Couples and The Centaur (an earlier book that still has some of the amateurishness you see in Rabbit, Run, but also many amazing passages). Embarrassingly, I have to admit I haven’t read much else of him. But this thread made me want to get back into him, maybe even reread the Rabbit books.

Suspect his religion is another reason he's out of favor. That sort of unobtrusive suburban Anglicanism is difficult for a modern critic to parse. It's not quite the easily dismissed southern evangelical flavor. But its equally out of the experience of the typical upper middle class literature graduate, without the cache and easy critical angle which overt Islam or Judaism might bring

I can't remember the name of it. I Read it in an issue of of Playboy or Esquire or some such later that year. My dad subscribed to a lot of magazines.