Friday Fiction: John Updike -- Prolific and Diverse

--by Hanje Richards

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Completely coincidentally, I find myself writing this blog post on John Updike’s birthday. He was born March 18, 1932 and died January 27, 2009. The actual inspiration for selecting Updike for "Friday Fiction" this week was a collection of short stories that was published after his death: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories.

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John Updike was a very prolific writer, who wrote poetry, essays, novels, short stories and criticism of both art and literature. “Updike populated his fiction with characters that frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family, obligations and marital infidelity. His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail.” He is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time.

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Updike was the recipient of many awards for his writing, including the O.Henry prize (twice), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (three times), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice).

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Today’s blog post features some of the John Updike titles in the Copper Queen Library's collection.

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Afterlife and Other Stories - An anthology of short fiction features twenty-two diverse tales that explore the magical fragility, memory, nostalgia, and translucent quality of life beyond middle age. After publishing more than 40 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays, Updike concentrates on aging protagonists and the abundant evidence of mortality that surrounds them. In these mellow, reflective stories, where parents die and grandchildren are born, Updike's heroes are acutely aware of lost glory yet discover the strength to persevere.

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Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel - At this juncture of his life, "semiobscure" literary writer Henry Bech may be "at bay" -- attacked by fellow writers, sued for libel, derided by critics, consumed by worry about his place in the literary pantheon. In five interrelated sections that move backward and forward through time, from 1986, when the 63-year-old Bech is in Prague, to 1999, when he accepts the Nobel Prize with his eight-month-old daughter in his arms, Bech pursues his craft, an assortment of women, vengeance, and peace of mind, veering between misery and elation, bathing in self-doubt or preening egotistically.

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Brazil - They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach -- Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen from the Rio slums, surviving day to day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, an upper-class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absent though very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought them together, betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart, Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west -- unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them.. . Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-sixties to the late eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence.

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Centaur - In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with his life.

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Golf Dreams: Writings On Golf - Updike recounts his love affair with golf, which he began playing at age 25, through 30 pieces that originally appeared in magazines and novels. Among the highlights are "Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy," in which Updike lampoons golf instructionals with elaborate advice on how to hold a teacup, and "Farrell's Caddie," a delightful short story in which a curmudgeonly Scottish caddie gives his employer advice on far more than which club to use. Fans of the Rabbit novels will also enjoy "Three Rounds with Rabbit Angstrom," in which the oft-frustrated Rabbit finds little relief on the links.

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In the Beauty of the Lilies - The saga of one family's journey through the spiritual landscape of 20th-century America opens in 1910, just as Theodore Wilmot's father, a Presbyterian minister, suddenly loses his faith. His loss is visceral, and no amount of intellectualizing can deter him from his realization that he must leave the pulpit if he is to remain true to himself. Eighty years later, Theodore's grandson, a lost soul in the post-Vietnam War era who has found strange comfort in a radical religious cult, experiences his own catharsis, as the flames literally rage around him. In the intervening years, we follow the lives of Theodore himself, and his daughter, Esther, who becomes a modern-day sort of goddess -- a movie star. Updike is an astute observer of the American experience and in Theodore Wilmot has created a quintessential 20th-century everyman.

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More Matter: Essays and Criticism - Shrewdly admiring essays on American past masters such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edmund Wilson, and Dawn Powell take their place beside penetrating assessments of contemporary peers and rivals -- John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Martin Amis. Here, too, are brilliantly original essays on religion and literature, lust and dancing, as well as a revealing selection of pieces about himself and his work. Whether he's writing about photography or film, golf or adultery, Bill Clinton's hair or the sinking of the Titanic, Updike never fails to dazzle or surprise. Generous, learned, and wickedly funny.

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Poorhouse Fair - At the County Home for the Aged, the inmates, having shed their cares and responsibilities, live out their remaining years. On the day of the Poorhouse Fair, the order is broken and the old people take charge. It is a day neither Conner, the poorhouse prefect, nor his charges will forget.

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Rabbit At Rest - In John Updike's fourth novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.

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Rabbit Redux - The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom --known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters -- finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. How he resolves -- or further complicates -- his problems.
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Roger’s Version - A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife -- and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl.

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S S. is Sarah Worth - doctor's wife, North Shore matron, loving mother, and now (suddenly!) ardent follower of a Hindu religious leader known as the Arhat. As this brilliant and very funny novel opens, Sarah is fleeing the confinement of her suburban life to become a sannyasin (pilgrim) at her guru's Arizona ashram. In the letters and audiocassettes that Sarah sends to her husband, daughter, mother, brother, best friend -- to her psychiatrist and her hairdresser and her dentist -- John Updike gives us a witty comedy of manners, a biting satire of life on a religious commune, and the story -- deep and true -- of an American woman in search of herself.

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Seek My Face - This novel takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

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Widows of Eastwick - After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie -–now widowed but still witches -– return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, “the scene of their primes,” site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a “haven of wholesomeness” populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity.

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Witches of Eastwick - In a small New England town in the late 1960s, there lived three witches: Alexandra Spoffard, sculptress, could create thunderstorms; Jane Smart, cellist, could fly; Sukie Rougemont, local gossip columnist, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, content but always ripe for adventure, our three wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub was the scene of some rather bewitching delights.