This week The New Yorker had an interesting blurb about marginalia–specifically the marginalia in the New York Public Library’s rare books collection by famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Coleridge. Marginalia, a fancy term for the notes and underlinings scrawled in books, can take many forms. The column got me thinking about how the way we read is such a subjective and personal experience–everyone processes what they read in different ways. I know people who consider it a form of vandalism to make any mark at all in the books they own, while others underline with abandon.

I don’t tend to mark up my books too much, but I like to be able to underline memorable passages, preferably in pencil, but I rarely make notes or comments. It just makes the experience of reading more personalized. Joe writes page numbers on the last page of the book with a couple of words from the passage he wants to remember. I find the process a little cryptic, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow of text as you’re reading. I find it’s like a delightful game when I borrow a book from him and then flip to the last page to go... more »

I knew Fringe had to run a tribute to Updike when I broke the news to the editors and received this email in response:

“Damn! No more girl-at-the-supermarket-has-nice-legs i’m-a-bastard-but-i-said-so-so-i’m-immune-from-criticism stories! Wait . . . . that’s probably not true at all.”

I was surprised that when I heard the news about Updike, I felt a little sad. I only read his work when my MFA workshops forced me to. During our discussion of “Pigeon Feathers” I’m sure I used phrases like “hetero-patriarchal order,” which is one of my favorites to say aloud because it has so... more »

Pushcart prizewinner and perennial Fringe girl-crush Stacey Richter had this to say:

When I was growing up, my parents had a small but incisive collection of the highbrow fiction of the day. I remember staring at their shelves and seeing hardbacks by Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Phillip Roth, and John Cheever, whose novel Falconer didn’t move from its spot on the living room coffee table for three years. We lived in the deep suburbs, with no bus service, before cable and VCR’s. It’s hard to describe how boring this was; it was sort of like a sensory deprivation chamber with a television in it. Given the time on my hands, it’s not surprising that I eventually read or tried to read every book in my parents’ library. I remember tackling Giles, Goat Boy when I was thirteen and The Complete Stories of John Cheever at about eleven. But I could never penetrate the shelf full of the guys I eventually came to think of as the self-loving males of the mid-twentieth century: Bellow, Updike, and Roth. Their books made me feel creepy. I sometimes picked them up and read a few chapters. They were about men; they were about men driving around.... more »

I know John Updike through his short stories and the many dozens of essays and reviews I read of his in The New Yorker and elsewhere. For me, as a writer, he’s a hero not so much for his actual writing — although wow, he could write — but for how he wrote: honestly, thoroughly, plentifully. 

Former Contributor Sarah Einstein shares her own very special memory of Updike:

John Updike introduced me to the concept of fellatio at the tender age of seven, when I stole Rabbit, Run from my mother’s bookshelf. I didn’t understand much of the book, of course, but knew that there was something fairly dirty going on. I asked my mother about it, and was given a copy of one of those sex-for-children books illustrated with vague watercolors of two peach hazes intertwined on the page and phrases like “make a baby” and “the mommy and the daddy.” She moved all of her books with smutty bits to a higher shelf. I, of course, just found a chair.

In Part VI of our series, Professor N.S.R. Ayengar writes:

Madras

30th Jan 09

John Updike, the most vociferous spokesman of the American ‘culture-war’ of the sixties, regrettably passed away on the 27th Jan at the age of 76. With his passing America has lost a luminous star from its literary firmament. Whatever his detractors may say about his obsessive depiction of sex – the unmitigated, lurid details of sex, especially that of female, his description of marital infidelity (which of course are the mainstay of majority of his novels as well as that of the famous five Rabbit novels), one cannot deny that he was one of America’s greatest prose stylists. He created a style which was effortlessly fluent, polished and mellifluous, almost bordering on poetry. Much of his obscenities get glossed over by his immaculate prose style and that also explains why his readers have tolerated him. But for his stylistic excellence, his books, perhaps, would have degenerated into cheap pornography.

Updike is often dubbed as the chronicler of “suburban adultery” – a fact which he never made any secret about. He once wrote that it was ‘a subject which if I have not exhausted , has exhausted me’. Yet on occasions... more »

Fringe art contributor Zehra Khan remembers John Updike in her image, Rabbit Redux (Watercolor on monotype, 2009).

Let me start off with a confession: I have never read a John Updike novel. Despite this deficiency, he remains in my mind as one of the most, if not THE most, prolific literary writers of our time, standing shoulder to shoulder with Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, giants of American literature.

Updike’s “A & P” was the first short story we read in my freshman year composition class in college, and I still remember reading his description of Queenie, the pubescent temptress who slaps barefoot into the local A & P to change Sammy’s life forever: “With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane on the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.” Sure, he was a classic “man’s man” writer (just a paragraph before, Sammy wonders parenthetically if girls really have a brain or if it’s “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar”), but his deft use of language and tone more than made up for... more »

In Part III of our series, Boston-based writer Scott Votel remembers John Updike:
One gets the sense that Philip Roth is uniquely alone today. With the death of John Updike, Roth now exists as the sole student of a certain school of masculine fiction that produced Bellow, Cheever, Yates, Mailer, Kerouac, and Salinger. While Roth surpassed John Updike long ago as the inventor of necessary and ingenious fictions, Updike remains a vital figure in American literary history. For perhaps too many readers under the age of 40, John Updike was easily dismissible: a near unrepentant chauvinist, a “non-hawk” who supported the Vietnam War, a prolific chronicler of white middle-class suburbanites, a linguistic show-off. Despite his suspect ethos, Updike was, at the elemental level of the sentence, one of the best writers in English. His only real rival as a stylist was Nabokov.

Studiously reading his work, one is nagged with the idea that Updike had literally seen everything, remembering it all enough to pen volumes filled with dazzling descriptions and disquieting metaphors. There’s the transcedently quiet moment between two strangers in “The Happiest I’ve Been.” Updike describes their conversation by noting “the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories;... more »

As many of you have heard, prolific American author John Updike died today. In this series, we ask Fringe contributors to remember a literary legend. Sarah Zucker is the second to weigh in:

John Updike is usually most well-remembered for his novels, which I have admittedly not read. His poetry, however, was crucial to my understanding of the inner-connectivity in the world around us. The Banal and the Sacred co-habitate within his poems seamlessly, and he speaks with a voice so familiar, so modern, that it shakes your core to recognize the deep truths within.

As many of you have heard, prolific American author John Updike died today. In this series, we ask Fringe contributors to remember a literary legend. Tom Conoboy is the first to weigh in:

John Updike has died. He was a great writer, whose early works will remain outstanding works of literature. In particular, The Poorhouse Fair is as ambitious and interesting a first novel as it is impossible to imagine. In it, the young Updike settled himself into the characters of a host of old and dying inmates of a poor house, and discussed life and death, Christ and and humanity, with a wisdom which is simply extraordinary in one so young.

Updike lost his way in latter years, and those novels, with their relentless focus on sexual relations, lost something of that essential human beauty that occupied his earlier works. I will remember him for The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, and Rabbit, Run. A more extraordinary trio of novels with which to begin a career it is difficult to imagine.

This is his character Hook speaking in The Poorhouse Fair. As an atheist, I can’t accept these words, but I suspect they were close to the views of Updike himself, and I quote them... more »