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 back and see what he found the stand out phrases to be. They’re often different from the things I would choose, and sometimes they’re the same. The picture, at left, is from the “Updike Marginalia” in Harper’s Magazine. From the page pictured, it looks like he has a similar method to Joe’s, but he also liked to make comments throughout the text, such as “too much throwing up” and “do we need this?” Apparently, many writers are better able to process the act of reading by writing.

How about you? Do you write as you read? Does it help you better understand or feel more connected to what it is you’re reading?

*cross-posted at Looks & Books

“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.”

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. They were about insecure, tortured men driving around, looking at women. And even when the subject was youth it still seemed like the subject was middle age: families, jobs, philandering, divorce. Where was the magic? It was weird. I gave up and reread “The Enormous Radio.”

A few years ago, I decided to try again. I love embarking on reading projects and I was beginning to feel stupid for having skipped the self-loving males of the twentieth century (not Cheever—I didn’t skip him.) Mostly I read Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike, and of those, I ended up reading the most of Updike because I read the four Rabbit books. I didn’t like Rabbit, Run, but by the time I had finished the quartet I realized what a remarkable project it was: the whole, imagined life of a character, a running document of the times, and it forms a thematic whole. Awesome! What ambition! What’s more, they’re funny, dark, and written with what seems to be an amazing inborn facility. Even the driving around passages were great—essential, even—and I hate driving around passages. But what I liked most about them is also what I hated initially: I came to realize that these books were a chronicle of my parents’ generation—especially the white, middle-class men who were too old to be baby boomers but were still affected by the sexual revolution of the sixties. No wonder I found these books creepy. No teenager wants to read about the inner lives of their parents’ contemporaries—this would suggest that their parents had inner lives. But in the end, that’s what I came to appreciate most about Updike and the other self-loving male writers of the mid twentieth century (who I realized were actually the self-loving/self-loathing writers)—that they were my parents’ contemporaries. Updike was the same age as my father. It makes sense that he would write about suburban life with affection and loathing, and enshroud his characters in entitlement and shame: I see these oppositions in my father’s life, and in the lives of his friends, men who were born into an era when they enjoyed a great deal of privilege (at least compared to women and minorities), and saw that privilege slowly leak away.

Updike was particularly obsessed with chronicling the social movements of his time, and I’m grateful to him for giving me a window into the struggles of my parents. I was especially saddened to hear of his death because I associate him with my father (still alive!) and because there was a little magic for me in Updike after all. Several years ago, I saw a real estate sign with the broker’s name on the bottom: John Updike. I pictured Updike holding an open house, and then I thought how great it would be to go around stenciling the names of great American authors on the bottom of all sorts of real estate signs: Great Floor Plan, Saul Bellow; Open House Cancelled: Joyce Carol Oates. When someone mentioned that Updike really did have a house in Tucson, I assumed it was the real estate Updike and not the genuine one. But I checked the tax records anyway (I’m a pretty good web-stalker). As it happens, there are many John Updikes in the world, and many in Tucson. But there’s only one who also has an address in Updike’s small town of Beverly Farms, and he does indeed own a condo in a golf community in the Tucson foothills. Since then, I sometimes like to pretend that I’m about to run into Updike in Trader Joe’s. I’d be the only person in Tucson to ever recognize him, and I’d just happen to have a copy of one of the Rabbit books with me for him to sign. Like all the old guys, he would be buying fourteen packages of frozen blueberries, and like all the old guys—my father included—his wife would be with him, giving orders and pawing through the salmon.

“Hello Mr. Updike,” I’d say, “it’s so nice to see you.”

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 he shunned his familiar territory and explored pastures green in such novels as: The witch of Eastwick(1984), The Coup(1978)- (about a fictional cold war – era African dictatorship), which were best sellers and showed the author at his Nobokovian best. In 2000 he wrote a carefully crafted and researched post- modernist novel on the story of Hamlet- Gertrude and Claudius. His other works like The Centaur,(the winner of National Book Award 1963) Couples(1968) and Roger’s version(1968) were extremely popular so much so that they won the author a place on the cover page of Time Magazine and brought him fortune.

Updike celebrated the ordinary American. He was the champion of the middle class. In an interview to Time Magazine(1966) he said “my subject is American protestant small- town middle class”. Yet he so admirably transformed the ordinary into something artistic by his supreme artistry.

In most of his novels one can detect an unconscious and unstated theme i.e the irrefutable correlation between unbridled promiscuity(unrestrained sex) and death. Therefore, though Updike inundates the readers by a hypertrophy of sexual imagination, the readers know where to stop. This need not preclude us from appreciating his greatness as an artist.

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 the often less-than-favorable portraits of females in his stories (taken with a grain of salt, as usual).

In my first grad school literature course, we read “Pigeon Feathers.” I don’t remember what other stories we read that week, but I do remember it was a decidedly more concise writer that our teacher contrasted with Updike’s winding and dramatic story on God and the nature of mortality. I was the only one in the class who preferred Updike’s style–I appreciated the lyricism of his language, and how he used it to illustrate larger issues that hulk in the corner of all of our minds.

I’m not the only one who remembers Updike fondly. For more remembrances of the author, check out these tributes:
Vernacular
NPR
The New York Times
Los Angeles Times
the New Yorker
the Guardian
the San Francisco Chronicle
the Chicago Tribune

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; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.” Or, there’s the fire in “Wife-Wooing” (from the uniformly excellent Maple stories collected in Too Far to Go): “A green jet of flame spits out sideways from a pocket of resin in a log, crying, and the orange shadows on the ceiling sway with fresh life.” Or, the cabbage from “Sublimating”: “the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft.” These sentences, plucked quickly from a candidate pool of hundreds of other ravishers, are the foundation of a career that carefully examined the depths of suburban ennui. As a literature, we need these sentences not because they expose the internal collapses of a privileged class but because they show us what malleable toys we have in our collective dictionary.

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 now in the memory of a man who believed, not only in his God, but in the goodness of humanity, too:

‘There is no goodness, without belief. There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next.’