LATEST AND FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 

The materials on this webpage and its section links are copyrighted for literary non-commercial uses.  No other uses of its contents are permitted.

Last Update  15 February 2008

Send your information, questions, and comments about this webpage by clicking the following link:  

centaurian@prexar.com

The archives of this section from 1996-2004 are available by writing to the email address listed above.

Photo: Peter MacDonald, Northfield Mount Hermon School, Winter 2003

2008

2008 SHORT STORIES

2008 SHORT STORIES

"Blue Light." Playboy, January 2008: 70-72; 156-160.

"Outage." The New Yorker ,7 January 2008: 66-70.

This first short story appearing in The New Yorker for 2008 maybe found online now at  http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/01/07/080107fi_fiction_updike .  Some commentary will follow when the print version arrives.

[J. Yerkes, 1-1-08]

2008 REVIEWS

"Back-chat, Funny Cracks," The New Yorker,  11 February 2008: 148-152.  A review of Flann O'Brien's "The Complete Novels" in the Everyman's Library edition; $25.

2008 ARTICLES

"Nocturnes," 7 January 2008, Vol. 55, No. 1: 14, 16.  

In an article titled, "Nocturnes," Updike reviews the exhibition, George Seurat: The Drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 28, 2007-January 7, 2008, in The New York Review of Books, 7 January 2008, Vol. 55, No. 1: 14, 16.  There are two excellent Seurat reproductions in the article: "Child in White (study for La Grande Jatte), Conte crayon on paper, 1884" and "Seated Woman with a Parasol (study for La Grande Jatte), Conte crayon and white chalk on paper, 1884-1885)." The first seems Updike's favorite and he closes the review with these almost nostalgic comments about it:

"And Child in White (1884) seems less a representation than an abstraction, with its white rectangle and two trapezoids; but there it is, very near the center of the panorama, those geometric shapes having become the bodice, skirt, and crown of a sunhat worn by a little girl caught up in the enchanted stillness of this Sunday moment—a moment that the young French artist, out to revolutionize the way we paint and draw what we see, froze in time at the threshold of modernism, when the ideals of tranquility and order could still be thought to rule" [p. 16, clmn. 2].

The full review cannot be read online without charge, but arrangements can be made at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20933 .

[J. Yerkes, 1-1-08]

2007

2007 BOOKS

Due Considerations: Essays and Critcism.  New York: Knopf, 2007. Pp. 732.  $40.00.  With 25 text illustrations.  ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0-307-26640-8 * 0-307-26640-0  (Canada: $50.00).  Publication date 23 October 2007.

2007 REVIEWS

"Classics Galore." The New Yorker, 29 January 2007: 85-87.  A review of Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf, $26) subtitled "Bocaccio in Hollywood."  Well, Smiley wrote a monster novel--450 pages (Ten Days in the Hills; Knopf, $26), and Updike seems only mildly impressed, though, as a fellow novelist, thoughtfully reflective and courteous about her literary effort. What I found particularly interesting is his early comment on the "bi-form" and heavily sexual character of the book--

". . . each chapter is roughly half talk and half sex.  The sexual descriptions set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent.  Smiley works in close focus, and from a male as well as a female point of view" (p. 85, clmn 1).  

This is followed by a passage that is, well, indeed anatomically and coitally explicit to the max.  Interesting.  Updike is largely remembered by many readers (who have no longer followed his works beyond their 40's, I have found) for the sexual characterization of Couples.  At that time in 1968 he was on the opening edge of more fully explicit sexual intimacy--which is why TIME magazine that year ran the cover story about it titled, "The Adulterous Society."  But from what he quotes of Smiley's book it is clear that things have moved to characterization leaving, literally, nothing to the imagination--all the anatomical details and manipulation precisely named and imaged.  I admit that I am likely the only one reading this who is so far behind in that kind of novel reading. Still, it is surprising to find Updike surprised by Smiley.  

I think what I concluded in thinking about the review is that many of the complaints about sex in Updike novels leveled by many women now seem pretty misplaced or out of date.   It's true that sexuality in Updike novels is processed through a male's eyes and sentiments--this he has often readily acknowledged, but that does not lead to the detailed sort of analytic coital and physiological description which one apparently finds in this Smiley novel.  Perhaps at this point I am just too old to appreciate the Smiley gain in such depiction.  Others of you who read this may want to comment on this Smiley phenomenon compared to Updike.  

A further matter of literary interest to me is Updike's understanding of the Smiley novel as an adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, finished in the year 1353--and, as Updike interestingly notes, that precursor story of five men and five women over ten days narrates its content "with no sexual interaction." In case, like me, you are not current on that classic, here is the brief description in Wikipedia:

"Decameron is structured in a frame narrative, or frame tale. Boccaccio begins with a description of the Bubonic Plague (specifically the epidemic which hit Florence in 1348, see Black Death) and leads into an introduction of a group of seven young women and three young men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the (then) countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for each one of the nights spent at the villa. Although fourteen days pass, two days each week are set aside: one day for chores and one holy day during which no work is done. In this manner, 100 stories are told by the end of the ten days."

Updike helpfully refers to Smiley's literary analysis, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), in which in her Introduction she confesses that after 9/11 in 2001 and the health crisis of her lover and partner, "I tried to remind myself of the illusory nature of the world and my conviction that death is a transition, not an end, to discipline my fears" (p. 87, clmn 1).  Updike sees this attempt at "a sublime carelessness" at work in Zoe, whom he judges the true "heroine" feminine character of Smiley's novel.  [Just a reminder that in Greek,  fellow ancient language students, Zwa, pronounced with a long "a" means "animating life" or "the state of one who possessed of vitality"]  It is an interesting point and he concludes toward the end of the review that "Smiley's raunchy survey of the human condition comes down to an endorsement of art and the relatively selfless, guileless artist" (p. 87, clmn 3). He notes with several references how "Her own art often warms itself at other works," but in this novel especially in terms of The Decameron.  

This is a very accomplished and, one senses, appreciative review of Smiley as a thoughtful contemporary literary figure, even though, as Updike comments at the outset, this "capacious novel . . . does not give the reader a warm welcome--the first chapter is cloying and confusing--but accommodates him amply enough so that at the end, four hundred and fifty pages later, he is reluctant to leave" (p. 85, clmn 1).  It is the honest human sentiments rather than the literary substance of this novel that he seems to laud. Have we ever had a reviewer that leaves us with such thoughtful substance as does Updike with astonishing regularity?

[J. Yerkes, 1-25-07]

"The Valiant Swabian." The New Yorker, 2 April 2007: 74-79.  A review of Walter Isaacson's new biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster; $32).   The full review --sans one blank space where a quotation from the book is missing in the online copy--may presently [30 March 2007] be found at  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/04/02/070402crbo_books_updike.  That blank space, by the way, turned out in the print version to be the final equation of Einstein's general theory of relativity on page 76. There is on page 75 a full page picture of Einstein in his Berlin office in the twenties, courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

[J. Yerkes, 3-30-07]

"The Changeling." The New Yorker, 16 April 2007: 154-157.  A review of Hermione Lee's new biography Edith Wharton (Knopf; $35). 

One thing I keep saying to myself: "John Updike is likely the most accomplished and readable literary critic America has produced in its history." If I were better read in the field of literary history I would likely be sure of that, but given my other-field of expertise (philosophical theology) I can't produce the goods to verify that claim.  Since his new book of essays and criticism (Due Considerations; Knopf, October 2007) is to appear soon I would appeal to this most recent review to back up my wild claim.  

This review ("The Changeling," The New Yorker, 16 April 2007: 154-157) is not only informative and very competently researched and written, but it is itself simply a literary joy to read.  The prose is beautifully unfolded--not as jingly, but fluidly flowing and inviting--and the substance of the insights of Wharton, along with the obvious research he has done in R. W. B. Lewis and others, and the careful reading of Lee, is extremely informative. I would guess some high-octane lit crits who know tons more about literature than I do might think this a far too extravagant praise by a know-nothing, but the world of readers--even of The New Yorker--is full of relative know-nothings.  And for us John Updike leads us into very green literary pastures and sits us down by still literary waters to ponder beautiful and important things.  

Again, as often so with me, it is the insights we get into Updike himself which deeply interests.  Perhaps I am alone, but I got the growing feeling that he felt very close to Wharton in her childhood precocious reading and literary interests.  They were miles apart in terms of family wealth and what Wharton could easily find in her father's library John Updike found at the Reading (PA) Library instead.  As a lad he scoured the shelves first of mysteries and then later of more important books.  And he read avidly, as a lot of us did, comic books and "big-little" books.  If you don't know what a "big-little" book is, then write me a note and I will fill in the blanks!  I remember getting a pack of maybe six or eight from my brother in the Navy during WWII when I was placed in an orphanage in Virginia.  Those books were so special to me as a boy, as they were to Updike.

But I think Updike bonded with Wharton in this early childhood literary precocity of interest and he feels with her in the role of a writer who is often misunderstood in intent.  And his own marital struggles seem to find reflection in Wharton's witness to her own similar trials and, in spite of it all, her personal transcendence that found a steadiness of spirit.  He notes, "as with most authors, her life was her ultimate subject" (clmn 1, page 157).  And then this closing flourish, which to many of us who have read Updike on his own authorial and marital struggles, seems to make the case:

"Asked about the role of the unconscious in creating fiction, she sounds somewhat French, somewhat starchy, and quite sensible:

    'I do not think I can get any nearer than this to the sources of my story-telling; I can only say that the process, though it takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness, is always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention.'

    The full light was not necessarily a harsh one. Her fiction shows a striking empathy with the losers of the world, without her wanting to be one of them. In the dreariest days of her dying marriage to Teddy Wharton, when she felt herself locked up in a prison de suie ("prison of soot"), she wrote Berenson, 'You mustn't think there haven't been bits of blue sky all the same; there always are with me; I can hardly ever wholly stop having a good time!'" [clmn 2, page 157]

Wouldn't it be great to have friends like Wharton--and Updike!  The book reviewed is Edith Wharton  (Knopf; $35) by Hermione Lee.  While Updike is very complimentary to Lee's work, I had the feeling he may have felt R.W.B. Lewis' work, "Edith Wharton: A Biography" (1975), was to be preferred for more scholarly details.  The Thierry Guitard picture illustration of Wharton and her dog (the image on each shoulder, one normal, one dark) which accompanies this essay is beautifully and thoughtfully rendered.

The review may currently be read online at http://www.newyorker.com:80/arts/critics/books/2007/04/16/070416crbo_books_updike .

If you also would like to make comments on this review of Wharton, please send them along.  I will post them all.

[J. Yerkes, 4-10-07]

"Famous Aimee." The New Yorker , 30 April: 76-79.  A review of Matthew Avery Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard; $26.95).

The current April 30 issue of The New Yorker , pp. 76-78, carries Updike's review of Matthew Avery Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard; $26.95) and is titled "Famous Aimee."  There is also the attached Edward Sorel color caricature drawing of Aimee Semple McPherson on page 77.  

In a first quick scan, this comment struck my eye and my interest:

From a standpoint outside Christianity, the distinction between mainstream Protestantism and marginal movements like Pentecostalism and the Salvation Army appears less significant than it does from within; all shades of the Christian religion derive from the same sketchy Gospel accounts of a charismatic miracle worker and a cosmic narrative wildly different from what science shows. Pentecostalism is unusual primarily in its expectation of present-day miracles-faith healing, talking in tongues-like those reported in Acts. But any version of Christianity must resort, in the end, to an assertion of faith, to fundamentalism of a sort, be it as simple as shouts of assent at a revival meeting or as pondered and impressively phrased as Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy.

Updike tells us also that , "The story of her life, which she dramatized in a number of high-flown and breathlessly candid memoirs and sermons, was retold by two biographers in the early nineties, Edith Blumhofer and Daniel Mark Epstein, and is now told again, with a determined sociological thrust, by Matthew Avery Sutton."

The review may currently be read online at http://www.newyorker.com:80/arts/critics/books/2007/04/30/070430crbo_books_updike .

[J. Yerkes, 5-1-07]

"Laissez-Faire Is More," The New Yorker, 2 July 2007:76-79).  A review of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, $26.50).

The key line opening the fourth paragraph says it most clearly: "Where the words 'new history' appear, revisionism will follow." The review article is titled, "Laissez-Faire Is More" (The New Yorker, 2 July 2007:76-79) Updike has frequently reminded his readers of his Depression origins as a boy in Shillington, PA.  It was hard scrabble for the five-Updike household, with the two men, father and grandfather, economically neutered by the stock market crash and joblessness.  While I was born in that same era, our family maybe was not as deeply financially depressed--I can't say for sure, but I can vividly recall my grandmother telling me that during the Depression they sent out my little-child mother and her brother, Alpharetta and Deverl, to pick up chunks of coal for the furnace along the railroad tracks in Logansport, IN.  Some of mother's clothes were made out of flour sacks, I know that for sure.  And the family largely talked little about those times--except my grandfather, a PRR railroad engineer for 45 years, remained an impacable foe of all debt and borrowing for his entire life as I recall it.  Everything of value in his house was carefully saved, painted, oiled, sheltered--and paid for.  So much for my story.  

Updike's is somewhat similar and the closing paragraph makes the same point, but, of course, in a much more eloquant way than I can do. It becomes no secret that Updike the reviewer here comes loaded with strong arguments, vivid memories, and deep emotions in assessing Shlaes' revisionist historical critique.  Her heroes were Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon, Updike's are Roosevelt and his male family members.  How interesting: Shlaes suggests that the weakness in both Hoover and Roosevelt was that, as a Quaker and an Anglican, both were too-motivated by communitarian Christian values.  Thus Roosevelt was too socialist and communist oriented, Shlaes argues.   Here is Updike's side in the closing paragraph:

My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back. His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him and, for all his paternal kindness and humorousness, communicated itself to me, along with his preference for the political party that offered "the forgotten man" the better break. Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery-the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out-mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century's greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

Let's hear that again, John Updike:

Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world.  For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century's greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

I guess we are clear about that now, aren't we?  

You may read the review online at the New Yorker website:  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/07/02/070702crbo_books_updike?printable=true .

[J. Yerkes, 6-26-07]

"A Boston Fable," The New Yorker, 1 October 2007: 98-100. A review of Ann Patchett's Run (HarperCollins; $25.95).

Updike notes in his review titled, "A Boston Fable," appearing in the forthcoming 1 October 2007 issue of The New Yorker (pp. 98-100) that Patchett's Run (HarperCollins; $25.95), "begins and ends with a holy statue, a painted rosewood carving of a red-haired Mary stolen from an Irish church in the mid-nineteenth century and brought to Boston by the descendants of the thief and his wife, who strikingly resembled the sacred image" (p. 99, clmn 1).

But in my quick reading of the review online, he is not terribly impressed.  The evaluation is, for Updike in most of his New Yorker reviews, pretty stern and pretty negative as critical analysis.

Compared with "Bel Canto," as it must be, "Run" is a tricky and flimsy work, a stylized fable of families, of parenting and vocations and race, set in a Boston and a Cambridge that, though accurately enough mapped by a former fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, do not feel as solid underfoot, as welcoming to the roots of imagination, as, say, the Kentucky of "The Patron Saint of Liars" or the Los Angeles of "The Magician's Assistant" (1997). Primed for commercial success, the book seems overdesigned, sprinkled with ornamental snowflakes and lowercase headings, and the novel feels overplotted. The plot, indeed, is so dense, artfully leading us from one point of suspense to the next, that the reviewer can scarcely venture a summary without betraying some of its carefully hoarded and deployed mysteries" p. 99, clmn 1).

As usual, Updike does not fail to note the positive features in Patchett's work, but overall he speaks of the novel as "pale" (p. 100).  He believes her earlier works were superior to this current novel.

The review may currently be read at The New Yorker website online at

http://www.newyorker.com:80/arts/critics/books/2007/10/01/071001crbo_books_updike?printable=true .

[J. Yerkes, 9-26-07]

"Sparky from St. Paul," The New Yorker, 22 October 2007: 164-169.

This is a late posting since I was away for two weeks and could not update the website.  Still, the review here (David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts, HarperCollins; $34.95) one of Updike's longest in recent years in The New Yorker.  Titled "Sparky from St. Paul" (The New Yorker, 22 October 2007, pp. 164-169) this review is one of his best and very thoughtful.  I recently viewed the PBS TV program about Schulz's life and while it was very interesting too, there were elements about the sadder side of Schulz's marriages than the book and Updike make clear.  Further, the TV broadcast seemed to portray Schulz as having all his life retained the same kind of robust religious commitment to the Church of God and its views as did he and his parents in childhood years.  Updike in this excerpt points up the fact that this was not so:

Schulz’s own religiosity seems to have quietly faded in the California sunshine, though he continued to contribute a cartoon panel to the Church of God magazine and for a time taught Methodist Sunday school in Sebastopol. His manifold newspaper interviews trace a gradual withdrawal: “I’m not an orthodox believer, and I’m becoming less of one all the time.” Robert Short, the author of the immensely successful “The Gospel According to Peanuts” (1964), admitted, “Sparky . . . could sound like the conservatives, but . . . there was always this very humanistic liberal strain that was beneath the surface.” In Schulz’s strip, the Great Pumpkin episodes verge on travesty if not blasphemy, and in his life he diffidently accepted his children’s lack of interest in Sunday school. His daughter Amy, who eventually became a Mormon, complained, “He never read [the Scriptures] to us kids and he never took us to church. He didn’t share it with us” [p. 168, clmn. 1]

This is just a matter of accuracy for me.  Updike himself, as I hear him through his later writings, has also shifted his religious sentiments somewhat, though he would not want to state publicly, I think, the kind of faded view Schulz suggests here.  Accuracy is important if for no other reason that Robert Short's 1964 The Gospel According to Peanuts was a best-seller and led people--like me--to assume he retained a somewhat "orthodox" evangelical Christian belief system all his life.  Maybe in 1964 this perspective had not shifted much for Schulz, but the quotes above make clear that was not the case later.  It is clear, however, that Schulz's personal sense of the responsible moral life remained deeply rooted all his life.  And to speak now favorably about the accuracy of the recent PBS program, it is also clear there that Schulz's children did not carry forward the same kind of moral clarity into their lives.  They say as much in the interviews.  Michaelis may make this matter clear, too, but I have not yet read the book myself.

As most of this website readers know, Updike began his career intending to become a caricaturist, or as most say, a cartoonist.  Some years ago copies of his earliest cartoons were published in The New Yorker.  So he is eminently qualified both as a literary critic and a "drawer" himself to shoulder this review for The New Yorker.  And by the way, there is a great full-page color original Schulz drawing of Charlie Brown on page 165 of the review.

You may currently read the full Updike review online at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/22/071022crbo_books_updike .

[J. Yerkes, 10/30/07]

"Nan, American Man." The New Yorker, 3 December 2007: ____.   A review of Ha Jin's latest novel, A Free Life.  It may currently be read online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/notable-books-2007.html?_r=2&ref=books&oref=slogin&oref=slogin .

"Visual Trophies," The New Yorker, 24 December 2007: 144-148.  A review of Robert Jackson's book, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 (National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton; $55).  The article is substitled "The Art of Snapshots."  

My guess is that most of us "older folks" will love the opening lines of this review--because we have "been there, done that"!:

Among the homely staples of twentieth-century life that have been unceremoniously retired by the microchip revolution—the typewriter, the pressed-wax record, the card catalogue—the camera loaded with film has met a swift and stealthy end. Digital cameras look much like their analog predecessors, but the viewfinder is different—a tiny TV screen, held at arm’s length—and we don’t have to wait for the mistakes to come back from the drugstore before discarding them. We didn’t, in fact, often discard silver-based snapshots, but kept them, with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came. They began to slide into obsolescence before the turn of this century, and had already become “collectibles,” with a fellowship of collectors and dealers feeding on the shoals of these silverfish as they raggedly rose from the depths of the private realm to surface in the marketplace.

This somewhat nostalgic opening is what pulls a reader into this review right away because we have all, as I said above, "been there, done that"!  Our own basement has boxes, yes big boxes, of this menagerie of curling, faded slips of pictures.  This review of Robert Jackson's book, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978, is titled "Visual Trophies" and substitled "The Art of Snapshots."  It will appear in print in the 24 December 2007 next issue of The New Yorker and pagination will be added when available.  For now, though, you can read the article at The New Yorker website, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/24/071224crbo_books_updike?printable=true .

 [J. Yerkes, 12-21-07]

 2007 ARTICLES

"What's Ahead for Tiger?" Links Magazine, April 2007: 86-88, 90.  Comments as the 2007 Masters Tournament opens in August, GA.

"Serra's Triumph." The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIV, Num. 12, 19 July 2007: 17-18.  A review of  Richard Serra: Sculpture: Forty Years, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 3-September 10, 2007. Catalog of the exhibition by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, Museum of Modern Art, 419 pp., $75.00.

"What Has Evolution Wrought?"  National Geographic Magazine, December 2007: 38-41.   An essay introducing the issue's major story, "Extreme Dinosaurs."

"Gold and Geld." The New York Review of Books, 20 December 2007: 26, 28.  A review of Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, based on a exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York, from Octaober 18, 2007-June 30, 2008. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Renee Price, with contributions by Ronald S. Lauder and others.  Neue Galerie/Prestel, 480 pp., $65.00.

2007 POEMS

"Frankie Laine (1913–2007)," The New York Review of Books, 31 May 2006, Volume LIV, Number 9: 8.

"Adultery," The Ontario Review, Spring/Summer 2007, No. 66: 22.

"Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital," The Ontario Review, Spring/Summer 2007, No. 66: 24.

"Sketch," The Ontario Review Spring/Summer 2007, No. 66: 23.

"Stripped," The Ontario Review, Spring/Summer 2007, No. 66: 24.

"Vacation Place," The Ontario Review, Spring/Summer 2007, No. 66: 23.

"Madurai," The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2007, Volume 300, No. 1: 102.

“Claremont Hotel, Southwest Harbor, Maine,” Poetry Magazine, July/August 2007, Vol. 190, No. 4: p. 270.

2007 SHORT STORIES

"The Apparition," The Atlantic Monthly, Summer Fiction Issue 2007: 10-13, 14, 16.  

**Several of us have been trying to track down what looked like a misspelling on the AM website with the title there "Apparation."  A published copy now shows that the correct spelling intended by Updike is "Apparition" and that someone at AM simply got it wrong.  Let's see, we don't do well teaching writing and spelling anymore in schools, do we?  Glitches like this and the grammar of sports commentators and even newscasters make clear we are not any longer educate a really literate people in our schools.

The byline reads online (only available there currently) "Milford did not want to draw too close to Lorena. At his age, he preferred to observe at a safe distance."  Hmmm.  Here is the accompaning picture to the text of the article which is availabe currently online only to subscribers.  

______

[J. Yerkes, 7-27-07

"Blue Light," Playboy, January 2008: 70-72; 156-160.  

[Updated 12-27-07]

I have now read the story and it is as described below.  The only additional information was in Updike's comment about his theory of how the short story craft should work, and, I note here in passing, he confirms the sense of autobiographical elements ensconced in the story. The Playbill notes read, "John Updike tell us that "Blue Light," which is among his more intimate tales, 'contains many of my personal truths.'  It also illuminates his feelings about craft.  'Short stories now seem to just end, as if the writer ran out of typewriter ink or paper or something,' he says.  'I have this old-fashioned notion that stories should snap shut in the last line and throw light back to the first sentence'" [p. 3].  The story conforms to this theory and unfolds at a thoughtful pace right up to the "snap shut."  The story is found Playboy, January 2008: 70-72; 156-160.

--------------------

This short story is in an issue I have not seen yet so I am not able to note pagination.  Updike seldom publishes in Playboy anymore and never did much except earlier in his career, as I recall, and so many who do not subscribe to the magazine will not know about this story. The basic theme is apparently somewhat autobiographical, as far I can tell right now from the summary I have seen, and the story is another setting in a doctor's treatment office.  "Blue Light" refers to the dermatological treatment light.  Updike has done a number of such doctor's office stories over the years, perhaps most remembered is "The Persistence of Desire" in his first short-story collection, Pigeon Feathers (1962).  Details when I have seen the magazine issue.

[J. Yerkes, 12-21-07]

=================================================================================================

2006

2006 BOOKS

Terrorist. New York: Knopf.  Pp. 320.  6 June 2006.  ISBN: 0307264653.  Forthcoming.

In Love With A Wanton: Essays on Golf.  Illustrations by Tania Lee.  New York: Thornwillow Press, 2006.  Limited Edition of 250 copies.  

2006 SHORT STORIES

"German Lessons." Playboy Magazine, January 2006, Vol. 53, No. 1: 81-82; 148-150.   Thanks to help from Larry Randen we now have the data on the January Playboy article.  Since neither of us are regular subscribers (!) we were not aware of the story's publication until information turned up on Google.  The title is "German Lessons," with the byline "He found adventure among former foes and wayward souls, and briefly acquired a few foreign thoughts."  

Comments will come when time is available to read the text, which Playboy archives kindly supplied us.

[J. Yerkes, 4-11-06]

"My Father's Tears." The New Yorker, 27 February 2006: 70-76.  Louis Stettner's famous photo, "Train Platform" (1958) provides the whole of the opening page 70.  

The story may currently be found at The New Yorker website at http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/articles/060227fi_fiction. 

There are dimensions of this story which recall portrayals of George Caldwell in The Centaur, whom Updike has clearly indicated was a figure intended to closely represent his experience with his father.  This story also, it seems clear, has much Updike/Father autobiographical material in it.  We are often warned by Updike, of course, that every story has some autobiographical frames, but a story is finally a story and one should be careful not to make story and autobiography coalesce without the discretion of such warning.  Nonetheless much in this story fits his own descriptions of the father and mother and marital relationships found in many interviews.

The two sentences which snapped open my consciousness with a thunderstroke are these--and could I be the only one who feels this way?:

"It is easy to love people in memory; the hard trick is to love them when they are there, in front of you" (p. 74, clmn 1), and "The dead are so easy to misquote" (p. 75, clmn 2).

Methinks noone who now has lost a father, particularly a son who loses, could easily deny the penetrating truth of these sharp arrows of memory wounds.

[J. Yerkes, 3-1-06]

"Kinderscenen," Harper's Magazine, Vol. 313, Issue 1879, December 2006: 79 [6].  

Updike has published three short stories in 2006: the first was "German Lessons" (Playboy Magazine, January 2006, Vol. 53, No. 1: 81-82; 148-150) and the second was "My Father's Tears" (The New Yorker, 27 February 2006: 70-76).  This short story (Harper's Magazine, Vol. 313, Issue 1879, December 2006: ___) about a boy's childhood memory of home and family scenes will immediately be recognized by Updike readers as reminiscenses clearly set in his own house on the corner in Shillington, PA.  There have been several documentaries about Updike and this house and, along with those of us who have actually visited that house, it is clearly the structure and lot location of 117 Philadelphia Avenue in Shillington.  The exact details of that house and setting in the story make that clear.  This story again focues on the family of five who lived there, but this time there is much more introspection by the boy, Toby, who memories we retrace.  Like "My Father's Tears" the detailed cador about his family--their appearance, their demeanor, their relationships--is quite striking and matches other characterizations found in The Centaur (Knopf, 1963), earlier short stories in Pigeon Feathers  (Knopf, 1962), and especially "A Sandstone Farmhouse" (The New Yorker, 11 June 1990: 36-48) and "My Father On The Verge of Disgrace" (The New Yorker, 10 March 1997: 80-85).  This is not to say the story is not also intended as fiction, but it is a biographically saturated fiction based on obviously personally reconsidered childhood memories.  Readers who have followed Updike's family narratives over the years in his fiction will find it continues to expand this intimate portraiture.  

[J. Yerkes, 12-19-06]

 2006 ARTICLES

"Love of Fact."  The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIII, No. 5, 23 March 2006: 8,10.  A review of the "Treasures from Olana: Lanscapes by Frederic Edwin Church" exhibit at the National Academy Museum in New York City February 9-April 30, 2006.

This review of the "Treasures from Olana: Lanscapes by Frederic Edwin Church" exhibit at the National Academy Museum in New York February 9-April 30,2006, appears on pages 8 and 10 of the March 21 edition of the New York Review of Books.  It is accompanied by three color reproductions of Church's work: on the cover, "Niagara" (1857), with the overlay print "John Updike: Frederic Church's Vision"; "The Hudson Valley in Winter from Olana" (1871-1872), p. 8; and "The Urn Tomb, Silk Tomb, and Corinthian Tomb, Petra" (1868), p. 10.  

Updike comments interestingly in the opening paragraph that "Eighteen oil paintings . . . show Frederic Edwin Church . . . to have been, when he let himself go in his quick onsite oil sketches, a dashing wielder of the brush.  Speed of execution let air into his art. . . . Church himself must have felt the superior liveliness of his preliminary oil studies, for he framed them and kept them in Olana, the Arabian Nights dream-home he built for himself and his family in the early 1870's, on a hilltop in view of the Hudson, on 250 acres he had begun to buy before the Civil War" (p. 8, clmn.1).  

Always with an eye to the religious dimension of things, Updike also notes, "Church took his name seriously.  His mentor Thomas Cole had been a pious Protestant, and so was Church.  His early canvases especially evince, as Avery puts it, an 'impulse to Christianize the landscape,' and his flaming cloudscapes blazon forth God's glory.  The biologist and science popularizer Stephen Jay Gould theorized that Darwinism, supplanting Humboldt's and the Reverend William Paley's theistic naturalism, dampened and discouraged Church in the later, declining decades of his career.  Theis diagnosis leaves out the rheumatic arthritis that made holding a brush painful, and the contemporary criticism that Church in his work wasn't subjective and spiritual enough" (p. 8, clmn. 4).

For myself, ever the art dunce, I knew little of Church and nothing of Olana, which now has become a state museum in New York.  It appears to me that we would all be well rewarded by visiting Olana Museum to see the amalgam of world cultural artifacts it contains.  I would like to do that and Updike's review makes it seem quite clear that Church is an American painter of distinguished gifts.

[J. Yerkes, 3-8-06]

"Late Works: Writers Confronting the End." The New Yorker, 7 & 14 August 2006: 64-71.  Writing as Critica-At-Large with emphasis on Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, and James Joyce, but including others.

Updike's fascinating article makes one wonder if he was assigned this task or if he wanted to write it and requested submission. Writing as Critic-At-Large with emphasis on Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, and James Joyce, but including others, Updike, taking his cue from Edward Said, observes in the opening paragraphs,

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer's life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us.  In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called "Last Works/Late Style." Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said's widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain" ($25). Said's central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven's late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an "idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal." In his own not easily understandable words, possibly clearer in the original German:

Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which-alone-it glows into life. He [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes." [p.64, clmn 1]

There is an accompanying eye-catching and modestly grotesque caricature of Shakespeare's on his death bed done by Ralph Steadman on p. 65. Updike's closing paragraph includes a citation from Said about Shakespeare's The Tempest.  Quoting Updike,

"The Tempest," like Beethoven's late compositions, refuses, in Adorno's phrase, to "reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled." Said wrote, "What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities." "The Tempest" affirms Prospero's death wish and retirement, and also Miranda's wonder, her naïve eagerness to live and to love. She has not yet come to the end of what is necessary. Father and daughter, far from irreconcilable, are onstage together. [p. 71, clmn 3]

Those of us in our 70's and plus will recognize a great deal of wisdom here--from these writers confronting the end (and Beethoven, of course, too) and from Updike, now 74 years old and thinking about his own "Last Works/Late Style"--and, need I note it, "Last Words."  Don't we all.

[J. Yerkes, 8-4-06]

"The Artist as Prospector."  The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIII, No. 10 August 2006: 34-35.  A review of the "Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscapte" exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City May 19-October 22, 2006.

Once again Updike has been called to do an art exhibit review and he performs as brilliantly as usual.  In "The Artist as Prospector: Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape," published in the most recent NYRofBks (Volume 53, Number 13, August 10, 2006: 34-35) he reviews the exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City which runs May 19-October 22, 2006.  There are three beautiful full color reproductions in the issue: Homer's Gathering Autumn Leaves (circa 1877) and Church's Surf Pounding Against the Rocky Maine Coast (circa 1862) and Coast a Mount Desert [Sand Beach] (circa 1850)--both of the latter two are scenes which I myself, now a Maine resident just half hour from Acadia National Park, have witnessed first-hand.  And Church has it right!

Updike sets his view of the exhibit focus in the opening paragraph:

Though Winslow Homer is represented by a number of amusing wood engravings and beautiful watercolors, and Thomas Moran adds his otherworldly West to the collective depiction of the relatively unspoiled American wilderness, it is Church whose heirs lodged over two thousand works in the collection of the Cooper Union Museum (as compared with more than three hundred by Homer and less than a hundred by Moran), and it is Church who, in his preternaturally deft and rapid oil sketches, most decisively places before us the thing itself, the New World's nature.

His closing comments, reflecting his earlier commentary on Church's Niagara Falls from the American Side (1867), blend well with the thoughts expressed in the essay noted above, "Last Works":

We come to Niagara in the patronizing spirit in which we approach everything nowadays, and for a few hours we have it our own way, and pay our little tributes of admiration with as much complacency as we feel in acknowledging the existence of the Supreme Being.  But after a while we are aware of some potent influence undermining our self-satisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the great cataract does not exist by virtue of our approval, and to feel that it will not cease when we go away.  The second day makes us its abject slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. [p.35, clum 4]

It's a great read.

[J. Yerkes, 8-4-06]

"The Artful Clarks." The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIII, No. 15, 5 October 2006: 9-11--the table of contents , by the way, incorrectly notes it starts on page 10.  A review of "The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings, an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts,June 4–September 4, 2006; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 22–August 19, 2007.

As usual, but more so because of the nature of the collection as the institutional legacy of the two different-minded philathropic Clark brothers, there is a great deal of fascinating intimate biography reviewed by Updike and much of the story, of course, is located in New York itself.  There is also a fascinating description of the tangled relationship between Isaac Merritt Singer of sewing-machine fame, and Edward Clark.  The closing Updike paragraph puts a very nice finish on the important relationship between art collectors and their collecting--as well as the benefactions for the rest of us who entertain reproductions in our homes:

"Three somewhat shadowy go-betweens intervene between works of art and the gallery-goer: the dealer, the collector, and the museum curator.  'The Clark Brothers Collect,' with its exceptionally weighty catalog, illuminates the personality and passion of collectors, and provokes reflection on the indispensable nexus of art and money.  The public museums, great and small, that are one of America's educational glories house collections expensively assembled by rich men and (pace Isabella Gardner and Baltimore's Cone sisters) women with lofty by not selfless motives.  Even a collector and donor as self-effacing as Stephen Clark (he gave anonymously at first, eventually allowed his name to be used but gave without any entangling stipulations, and attached his name to none of the institutions he founded) sought to associate himself with something more enduring than the flux of commerce and human life.  Even a few farmed prints in a workingman's home express the wish to welcome a tough of transcendence into the perishing quotidian.  The Clarks pruchased at prices generally in five figures works that, where artistic fashion has not devalued them, would now cost millions, could they be bought all.  Collectors invest in the future, assembling a perpetuation of their best, most discriminating selves" [p. 11, clmn. 4].

The article also contains lovely color reproductions by Thomas Eakins, Dr. Agnew, circa 1889; John Singer Sargent, Carolus-Duran, 1879 (page 9); Pierre-August Renoir, Onions, 1881; and Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples and Pears, 1885-1887 (page 10).  

[J. Yerkes, 9-20-06]

"After Katrina."  The New York Review of Books, 30 November 2006: 8, 10, 12.  It is a review of New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 19-December 10, 2006.

John Updike's latest art museum review appears in the 30 November 2006 issue of The New York Review of Books, pages 8, 10, 12. It is a review of New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 19-December 10, 2006.  There are three half-page full-color reproductions of Polidori's photographs in the article, including the one which graces the cover of his book.  Polidori did a similar photographic study of the disaster at Chernobyl (Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl (Steidel, 2003).  Updike has given us another beautifully written essay about the heart-breaking tragedy which destroyed more than 160,000 homes, mostly African-American, in New Orleans's 9th and low-lying district.  I am trying to recall and cannot quickly if this is the first fully photograph exhibit Updike has covered over the years.  I would be glad to be reminded, if so.  For Updike the importance of the exhibit, along with one about the 9/11 tragedy, is Joel Meyerowitz's comment, "It is for our children and our grandchildren . . . This is what it looked like; this is what we don't want to happen again" [p. 12, clmn 4].

[J. Yerkes, 11-19-06]

2006 REVIEWS

"Drawn to Gypsies," The New Yorker, 10 April 2006: 83-85.  Review of Fernanda Eberstadt's non-fiction book, Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France (Knopf; $24.95).  

Updike has returned to his reviewing ways this year after a stellar 2005 year of eleven book reviews and one museum art review (See this website's link A Cumulative Updike Publications Bibliography 1997-2006).  This review covers a non-fiction book, a somewhat rare phenomenon in Updike work, but not wholly so.  Over the years he has done such, but the major vein of his output is fiction and dominantly foreign author fiction.  

Updike is predictably precise in his review, but all in all this is not a book that seems to him not quite up to snuff as good reading and keen insight. So he notes, "Though her six years of living in Roussillon may have left her with 'the same attraction to their intractable difference,' reader of her account, if this reviewer is an example, will be cured of any faint desire they may ever have entertained to live like a Gypsy" (p. 83).  His conclusion: "Eberstadt's mildly melancholy coda to her dire portrait of contemporary European Gypsies leave us with the mollifying impression that all parties end untidily, all lives are more or less muddles, and we are all, as the French officially term nomadic minorities, 'gens du voyage'" (p. 85).

[J. Yerkes, 4-20-06]

"90% Hateful," The New Yorker, 22 May 2006: 76-80.  A review of Michel Houellebecq's novel, The Possibility of an Island (Knopf; $24.95), translated from the French by Gavin Bowed.  The review is accompanied by an excellent full-page Houellebecq personal caricature drawn by Ralph Steadman (p. 77).

The title of Updike's review of Houellebecq's novel, The Possibility of an Island, translated from the French by Gavin Bowed (Knopf; $24.95), in the 22 May 2006 issue of The New Yorker is titled, "90% Hateful" (pp. 76-80).  It is not a review that will make many, likely most of us, want to read it.  Fair as always, but quite frank about the difficulties of Houellebecq's cynical and near-hateful Weltanschauung (my term), Updike notes what to me is a most interesting feature of the plot.  Given it is "a lengthy exercise in futuristic science fiction, the hero, named Daniel, involves himself in the founding stages of a worldwide cult, Elohimism, that delivers its adherents into practical immortality, achieved through replacement of the deceased individual by a DNA-derived duplicate possessed of not only the same bodily traits but the same memories. "  So, right, you do now want to read it.  This is some kind of book, obviously. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of Updike's helpful interpretive review and critique.

It is to the credit of the French novelist, poet, and provocateur Michel Houellebecq that, in his new novel, "The Possibility of an Island" (translated from the French by Gavin Bowd; Knopf; $24.95), he so boldly, with considerable energy and erudition, seeks to confront and encompass the fundamentals of the human condition-or, to quote his veiled reference to André Malraux, "what a pompous author of the twentieth century had felt fit to call 'the human condition.' " It is to Houellebecq's discredit, or at least to his novel's disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts and aspirations the reader can care about. The usual Houellebecq hero, whose monopoly on self-expression sucks up most of the narrative's oxygen, presents himself in one of two guises: a desolate loner consumed by boredom and apathy, or a galvanized male porn star. In neither role does he ask for, nor does he receive, much sympathy. . . . (p.76).

. . . In "The Elementary Particles" [an earlier Houellebecq novel], it is said of Michel Djerzinski that "he'd always had a tendency to confuse happiness with coma." The love of his life, as she lies dying, "seemed to him completely happy." A fulfilled death wish may be the best, all orgies past, that Houellebecq can provide. Daniel1, the performer of hateful sketches, boasts of being told by a friend:

On the intellectual level I was in reality slightly above average, and on the moral level I was the same as everyone else: a bit sentimental, a bit cynical, like most men. I was just very honest, and therein lay my distinction; I was, in relation to the current norms of mankind, almost unbelievably honest.

But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last? The island possible to this airless, oppressive imagination has too few resources. The final edition of Daniel has sunk to the condition of a mollusk: "I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation." The sensations that Houellebecq gives us are not nutritive" (p. 80).

Sharing the same age with Updike, I hear in these words the sentiments of a man coming toward the end of life himself, one who values very much "the best of each stage of life, including the last."  Ditto for me and for many of us moving closer each day to the end of the pier.  

[J. Yerkes, 5-16-06]

"Blood and Paint," The New Yorker, 29 May 2006: 84-85.   A review of Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story [Knopf; $24].  Updike likes Carey and I remember the good review he gave of Carey's last book, True History of the Kelly Gang.  He continues to like Carey, but this time he says,

Peter Carey is a superb writer, whose prose is always active, and who infuses his characters, however eccentric, with a warmth that lets them live in our minds.  But "Theft" is not a superb novel; there is something displaced at its heart.  Its colorful means keep us at one remove from the central action, which, in retrospect, is perfidious and  shocking (p. 85).

This is about as gentle a let-down as one writer could give another.  Readers will find the review quite helpful, if brief.

[5-28-06]

"Extended Performance," The New Yorker, 31 July 2006: 74-76, 78.  A review of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow (Pantheon; $30) and his other works.

"Extended Performance" is substitled "Saving the Republic of Aburiria."  The review of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow (Pantheon; $30) also discusses his plays and other books.  Ngugi's work, Updike explains, is that of a formerly imprisoned exile from Kenya.

"His first novel in Gikuyu, "Caitaani Mutharaba-ini" ("Devil on the Cross"), of 1980, was written in prison, on toilet paper. His last novel in English, "Petals of Blood" (1977), furiously tackled, from a leftist angle, contemporary corruption in Kenya and its government. Upon his release from prison, he was not reinstated in his position at Nairobi University, and in 1982 he left Kenya for London. His exile eventually took him to California, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature at the Irvine campus of the University of California, and the head of its International Center for Writing and Translation; his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, directs the faculty and staff counselling center there" [p.74, clmn 3].

To prepare us for the discipline required for reading the sort of literature in Wizard of the Crow, Updike notes,

"The forces ensconced in Ngugi's imaginary Free Republic of Aburiria, the venue of "Murogi wa Kagogo," are demonically malign, and even the benign counterforces partake of magic and sorcery. English-language readers can now explore Aburiria in an English translation by the author, under the title "Wizard of the Crow" (Pantheon; $30).

Such readers would do well to remember that it is a translation from a language whose narrative traditions are mostly oral and heavy on performance; the tale is fantastic and didactic, told in broad strokes of caricature. Its principal political actors wear physical distortions like large, firelit masks " [p. 76, clmn 1].

[J. Yerkes, 8-4-06]

"Hugger-Mugger"  The New Yorker, 18 September 2006: 86-88.   Reviews le Carre's The Mission Song [Little, Brown; $26.99] and Ward Just's Forgetfulness [Houghton Mifflin; $25].

[J. Yerkes, 9-20-06]

"Down the River." The New Yorker , 6 November 2006: 116-119.  A review of The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, published by Norton ($39.95), and edited by Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr.and Hollis Robbins from Johns Hopkins University.

Updike's latest review appears in The New Yorker November 6 issue (pp. 116-119) under the title, "Down the River."  The book is The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, published by Norton ($39.95), and edited by Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr.and Hollis Robbins from Johns Hopkins.  Ever honest, Updike is not much enamoured with the annotations of Gates and Hollis, but he is very much enamored by Stowe's book and story.  He acknowledges that this is the first time he has read the book--an interesting fact given Updike's prolific reading as a boy to which he often refers.  The specific illustrations by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias from a 1938 edition he compliments readily.  

Updike discusses the centrality of Christian faith Stowe's book and comments,

There can be no denying that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" insistently presents Christianity as the main means of black integration-the path to respectability, the call to liberation, the antidote to despair (though Stowe, like Baldwin, concluded that anti-black racism is so ingrained in the United States that a black man would do better living elsewhere, be it Liberia or Europe). Christianity in Dickens or Trollope is just a lick and a promise compared with Christianity for Stowe. The daughter and wife of theologians, she repeatedly confronts the most accessible argument for atheism, God's apparent silence and indifference to human suffering. She herself, in 1849, had lost an infant son to cholera, and the novel's most eloquent atheist, Legree's concubine, the ladylike quadroon Cassy, has killed her infant son with laudanum rather than let him live as a slave. She tells Tom, the novel's central embodiment of submissive faith, after Legree has given him a savage beating:

"There's no use calling on the Lord-he never hears . . . ; there isn't any God, I believe; or, if there is, he's taken sides against us. All goes against us, heaven and earth. Everything is pushing us into hell. Why shouldn't we go?" [NYer, p. 118]

He goes on, "The novel's huge success stemmed, it may be, as much from its vivid religious affirmations as from its attack on slavery. Stowe, who experienced a religious rebirth at the age of thirty-one, had dwelled longer and more deeply with Christianity than with abolitionism. The two in any case were entwined . . . " [p. 118].

Updike also discusses briefly the comment of author Jane Smiley which in 1996 gave rise to the "which is the greater" controversy about the relative literary value of Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Stowe's Cabin.  His conclusion, noting both strengths and weaknesses in Twain's Huck, is, "It seems too much to say, as Smiley does, that 'the power of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the power of brilliant analysis married to great wisdom of feeling.' Its power is that, crude and manipulative as parts of it are, it never makes light of slavery and its attendant vast misery" [p. 119].

[J. Yerkes, 11-1-06]

"America's Beloved." The Guardian, 18 November 2006.  A review of The Letters of EB White: Revised Edition.

[J. Yerkes, 11-20-06]

2006 POEMS

"Lucian Freud," The New York Review of Books, 25 May 2006, Volume 53, Number 9: 23.

"Colonoscopy," Poetry Magazine, July/August 2006: 289.

"Dry Spell," The American Poetry Review, September/October 2006. (Located on the back cover.)

"Half Moon, Small Cloud," The Atlantic Monthly,  October 2006: 88.

[J. Yerkes, 9-20-06]

============================================================================================

2005

2005 BOOKS

Three Trips: The Short-Story Writer as Tourist.  UK: Penguin Books.  64 pp.  6 May 2005.  ISBN: 0141023090.

Trio. By Robert Pinget.  Introduction by John Updike. Barbara Wright, Translator.  Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.  Paperback. Pp. 229. $25.00. ISBN: 1564784088 (October).

Still Looking: Essays in American Art.  New York: Knopf. Pp. 288.  $40.00, ISBN 1-4000-4418-9.  14 November 2005.

2005 SHORT STORIES

"The Roads of Home." The New Yorker, 7 February 2005: 74-81.

This story will warm the hearts of those fans of David Kern from the earliest of Updike's fiction--starting with the short story "Pigeon Feathers."  We are back in "his" Pennsylvania for a late-life visit.  The story appears in the 7 February 2005 issue of The New Yorker, pages 74-81.  

David Kern returns to the Pennsylvania setting of the area near Reading, here Alton again, but unless I missed it I did not see the fictional names of Plowville (Firetown) or Shillington (Olinger). The scene moves from the farm area to Alton--at least that is what my quick reading showed.  After getting thoroughly confused when off the PA Turnpike near his former home, he drives past his own farmhouse, visits with Mennonite neighbors there, and then meets two former classmates at the Alton Country Club for dinner--after getting lost again en route there, too.  He is led back by car almost patronizingly to the Alton Motor Inn by his classmates and he frustratingly closes the story with the line, "I know where I am now! I'm here."

This is the setting in which Updike seems most at home even yet, after years in New York City, Ipswich, and now Beverly Farms, MA. Many of us feel most at home with him here because that is where we met him--perhaps in The Centaur or those charming  Olinger Stories many of us treasure yet in the paperback edition.  Everyone will be charmed and delighted anew, I have no doubt. 

The story is currently available online at http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fiction/050207fi_fiction.

For some who would like the pleasure of seeing some of the places and setting where Updike has lived over the years, including the Plowville and Shillington areas, Dr. Peter Windhorst put together a website, "An Updike Geography," with pictures of John Updike's residences and significant sites over the years, starting at the Shillington residence and extending to the house in Georgetown. Since Updike's home on Beverly Farms, MA, shore property is private, no picture was available to him--a picture of St. John's Episcopal Church there substituting, but several other interesting sites appear that will interest Updike readers.  The website address is http://www.windhorst.org/updike.

Here is the list of pictures available:

117 Philadelphia Avenue, Shillington, PA (1932-1945); A Sandstone Farmhouse, Plowville, Pennsylvania (1945-1950); 26 East Street, Ipswich, Massachusetts (1958-1970); Updike rents a one-room office, above a restaurant and overlooking the Ipswich River, in the Caldwell Building, South Main Street, Ipswich (1961); Labor-in-Vain Road, Ipswich (1970-1974); Updike's apartment 151 Beacon Street, Boston (1974-1976); 58 West Main Street, Georgetown, Massachusetts (1976-1982); Updike moves in 1982 to a house in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts and attends St. John's Episcopal Church (shown).

[J. Yerkes, 2-3-05]

2005 REVIEWS

"Subconscious Tunnels."  The New Yorker, 25 & 31 January 2005: 91-93.  

A review of Haruki Marakami's Kafka on the Shore (trans. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel; Knopf, $25.95), subtitled "Haruki Marakami's dreamlike new novel."  The first paragraph makes it clear Updike respects the novel very much, "dreamlike" and Japanese Shinto Buddhist though it expresses.

Haruki Murakami's new novel, "Kafka on the Shore" (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel; Knopf; $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be. Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz club before he became a published writer, with the novel "Hear the Wind Sing," in 1979. Though his work abounds with references to contemporary American culture, especially its popular music, and though he details the banal quotidian with an amiable flatness reminiscent of Western youth and minimalist fiction in the hungover nineteen-seventies, his narratives are dreamlike, closer to the viscid surrealism of Kobo Abe than to the superheated but generally solid realism of Mishima and Tanizaki. We often cannot imagine, while reading "Kafka on the Shore," what will come next, and our suspicion-reinforced by Murakami's comments in interviews, such as the one in last summer's Paris Review-is that the author did not always know, either.

The full review may be found now online at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050124crbo_books1.  Thanks to Richard Rabicoff who never fails to deliver the first news of new Updike reviews.

[J. Yerkes, 1-17-05]

"Mixed Messages." The New Yorker, 3-14-2005: 138-140.

Updike's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin; $24.95). The subtitle is simply the book's title. The full text is currently available online at http://newyorker.com/printable/?critics/050314crbo_books1 .

Updike does not use the term "post-modern," but this is clearly the format and tone of Foer's fascinating novel. Updike calls it "picto-/typographical" in format and that seems to me an apt term. Post-modern articulation really does call for new vocabulary and stylistic invention--at least it seems so to me.

This is a novel about a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell who has lost his father in the twin-towers 9/11 tragedy. This focus on children much interests Updike, but one gathers he is not quite sure contemporary novelists like Foer have got it right regarding a child's self-understanding--or lack thereof.  Here are Upidke's comments along the way, including his respectful but unconvinced literary conclusion:

"The novel, traditionally a mirror held up to the Western bourgeoisie, to teach its members how to shave, dress, and behave, has focussed on adult moral choices and their consequences. With some brilliant exceptions like Dickens and Mark Twain and Henry James, novelists have not taken children seriously enough to make them protagonists. However sensitive and observant, the ordinary child lacks property and the capacity for sexual engagement; he exists, therefore, on the margins of the social contract-a rider, as it were, on the imperatives and compromises of others. Yet in recent years a number of young novelists-Stephen Millhauser and Jonathan Lethem, for two-have devoted their most ambitious and energetic efforts to detailing the fervent hobbies and the intoxicating overdoses on popular culture, the estrangement and the dependence that characterize contemporary American childhood. Childhood's new viability as novelistic ground may signal a shift in the very nature of being a human being, considered anthropologically as a recipient and continuer of tribal myths, beliefs, and strictures. . . . (p. 138, clmns. 1,2)

People know more than they are told. They know when they are loved, and did even in eras when "love" was not the all-purpose catchword it has become. As no less aloof an eminence than T. S. Eliot wrote:

There's no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that's lived in

But not looked at, love within the light of which

All else is seen, the love within which

All other love finds speech.

This love is silent.

We must trust our parents, our children to hear us even in silence, in an age that fears silence, when Muzak, TV, and their computerized counterparts fill the few crannies left by traffic noise. Foer is, I would say, a naturally noisy writer-a natural parodist, a jokester, full of ideas and special effects, keen to keep us off balance and entertained. The novel's very title, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," suggests the kind of impact he wants to make on the reader. But a little more silence, a few fewer messages, less graphic apparatus might let Foer's excellent empathy, imagination, and good will resonate all the louder." (p. 140, clmn. 2) 

[J. Yerkes, 3-10-05]

"Incommensurability," The New Yorker, 24 March 2005: 71-76.

The extended review titled "Incommensurability" is found in The New Yorker, 28 March 2005 issue, pp. 71-76.  Joakim Garff's book, translated from the Danish by Kierkegaard scholar Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton; $35), is given a very careful reading by Updike and his conclusion is worth significant:

Human life itself is a skándalon. There was sophistry in Kierkegaard's attack, but also the fierce, nay-saying passion of Paul and Augustine. Garff's concretely local biography, big as it is, does not find space to speak of Kierkegaard in the world at large, after his death: his reputation's slow creep out of Denmark, by way of Germany; his influence on Kafka and Karl Barth and Unamuno and Sartre; his paternity of existentialism and Protestant neo-orthodoxy; the breath of new life he gave, however little he would have wished it, twentieth-century Christianity. Dying, having excoriated the established church and refused to take Communion from an ordained clergyman, he nevertheless reassured his comforter the pious Emil Boesen, who had asked if he believed in Christ and took refuge in Him, "Yes, of course, what else?" A person was either, by one of his formulations, lost in the "dizziness of abstract infinity" or saved "infinitely in the essentiality of the religious."

There is a sense in which Soren Kierkegaard was as influential as Karl Barth for the early--to use his own memoir's term--"angst-besmogged" early adult life.  This is an excellent review and equally significant color picture inset on page 69 is the "satirical caricature in the Copenhagen magazine The Corsair, published at the height of his local celebrity, shows him standing at the center of a revolving belt of stars, everyday objects, prominent Copenhagen structures, and the sun itself. The caption reads:

There are moments when one's ideas become confused and one thinks that Nicolas Copernicus was a fool when he maintained that the earth revolved around the sun. On the contrary, the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe, and Copenhagen revolve around Søren Kierkegaard, who stands silently in the center and does not even remove his hat for the honor being shown him.

This was no joke; Kierkegaard's great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. He offered himself as a corrective to idealism, from Plato to Hegel:  

Now if we assume that abstract thought is the highest manifestation of human activity, it follows that philosophy and the philosophers proudly desert existence, leaving the rest of us to face the worst.

This review is well worth careful reading, especially by those who wonder why Updike has always shown such deference to Kierkegaard.  If you don't know much about Kierkegaard, this is a very good introduction to the heart of his viewpoint and odd personal and authorial life.

The review may currently be found online at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/050328crbo_books

[J. Yerkes, 3-24-05]

"Bitter Bamboo."  The New Yorker, 9 May 2005: ___.  Subtitled, "Two Novels from China."  These are novels by mainland China authors: My Life as Emperor, by Su Tong (Hyperion East; $24.95), and Big Breasts & Wide Hips, by Mo Yan (Arcade; $27), translated by Howard Goldblatt.

In this review, as always, Updike is faithful to give us a good literary analysis, but it is clear his judgment is that such Chinese novels have a way to go before they achieve literary maturity.   Full bibliographic data will be posted when my issue arrives.  Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraph which gives the sense of Updike's take on these Chinese newcomers.

The one Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize (if we don't count Pearl Buck) was an expatriate Parisian, Gao Xingian. Bookstores, the Times reports, are bustling, but nearly half the purchases consist of textbooks and half the translations are of American books. Meanwhile, American translation of contemporary Chinese fiction appears to be the lonely province of one man, Howard Goldblatt, the founding editor of Modern Chinese Literature and a professor currently at the University of Notre Dame. Goldblatt's midwifery has recently given us two novels by mainland authors: My Life as Emperor," by Su Tong (Hyperion East; $24.95), and "Big Breasts & Wide Hips," by Mo Yan (Arcade; $27). Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum," which Goldblatt translated in 1993, won considerable notice and the hopeful remark from the Chinese-American author Amy Tan that "Mo Yan's voice will find its way into the heart of the American reader, just as Kundera and García Márquez have." Well, that's a tough old heart, and I'm not sure the Chinese are ready to crack it yet.

The full review may currently be read online at http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050509crbo_books .

[J. Yerkes, 5-3-05]

"The Great Game Gone" The New Yorker, June 13 &20 2005: 174-176.  Subtitled "The post-Cold War spy novel." A review of Robert Littell's new novel, Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation (Overlook; $25.95).

Updike's review of Robert Littell's new novel, Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation, rehearses how Updike as a boy read vociferously in the spy thriller genre, but concedes here that the novels written during the cold war years had a special edge that, while still somewhat present again here, is not quite the same.

[J. Yerkes, 6-9-05]

"Paradises Lost."  The New Yorker, 5 September 2005: 152; 154-155.  A review of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (Random House; $25.95).

The review is titled "Paradises Lost" and is found in the 5 September New Yorker, pp. 152; 154-155.  As a generalization it can be said Updike here is not high on Rushdie's current work, but as always he finds important things to praise.

The review also currently may be found in full text on The New Yorker website at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/050905crbo_books. The review was posted online August 29.

Here is the closing paragraph.  

"In his ten years under the fatwa, Rushdie lived with the vehemence of offended Islam, and, as a fiction writer should, he absorbed the experience and found vehemence within himself. His counterattack on his Islamic persecutors is under way in such broadsides as a recent Op-Ed piece in the Times, "India and Pakistan's Code of Dishonor," and in fiction that animates Islam's tenacious rage with faces and life stories. His invention, in "Shalimar the Clown," of the "iron mullah," a zealot literally made of metal, is excellent caricature, and the mullah's speech inculcating warrior zealotry is awesome in its disconnection from anything the West calls civilization. Rushdie in his Manhattan retreat is no longer a Third World writer but a bard of the grim one world we all, in a state of some dread, inhabit. The novel's concluding pages conjure up the sensations of the hunter and the hunted wonderfully well, with, uncharacteristically, understatement, the mark of authority. The climactic ending, in one more cinematic allusion, suggests the most terrifying scene in "The Silence of the Lambs." This time, though, the night-vision goggles are on the eyes of Jodie Foster."

[J. Yerkes, 8-29-05]

"A Cloud of Dust." The New Yorker, 12 September 2005: 98-100.  A review of E. L. Doctorow's The March (Random House; $25.95).

"Metropolitan Art." The New York Review of Books, 16 October 2005: 1; 10-12. Review of Jed Perl's New Art City (Alfred A. Knopf; $35). (Titled "'New Art City': Abstract Expressionism and Its Aftermath" for the online version at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/review/16updike.html?8bu&emc=bu.

It's been said before, but usually in a mocking criticism, that John Updike writes more than most of us readers can keep up with.  That is, if we do much else with our spare or intellectual time!  So not only is his own book on modern American art soon to appear (Still Looking: Essays on American Art, November 14--see description below), but this week alone he has had published two rather major reviews of artistic matter.  This one, titled "Metropolitan Art" in the print edition of the NYTimes, is the most extensive.  It is front cover material and is accompanied not only by the Ray Bartkus painting at the right here, but also large photographs of Willem de Kooning (by Arnold Newman, 1959), Joan Mitchell in her Paris studio (by Loomis Dean, 1956), Franz Kline (by Fritz Goro, 1954), Marcel Duchamp in his West 14th Street studio (by Weintraub-Budo, 1956), and Jackson Polluck (by Martha Holmes, 1949).  Moreover, if you currently go to the NYTimes website at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/review/16updike.html?8bu&emc=bu you will find a slide link to click in order to see all these photographs--in much sharper focus format, of course.

Furthermore, you can also upload the first chapter of Perl's New Art City at this website link on that NYTimes page: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/chapters/1016-1st-perl.html .

Updike is firmly critical of Perl's criticism of DaDa in the mode of Jasper Johns. The article pagination is 1 [cover] and 10-12.

[J. Yerkes, 10-17-05]

 "Deceptively Conceptual."  The New Yorker, 17 October 2005: 170-172. Review of By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger (Princeton Architectural Press; $29.95).

Already John Updike is publishing his eighth review this year for The New Yorker, together with his ninth for the New York Times Review of Books noted below.  This New Yorker review of By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger (Princeton Architectural Press; $29.95), titled "Deceptively Conceptual" (pp. 170-172) is also accompanied by three full-color classic photographs of Ulysses covers by Ernst Reichl (1934), E. McKnight Kauffer (1949), and Carin Goldberg, (1986)--all using the "big U" format--though Reichl's cover is big letters totally and it has, interestingly, been restored for the newest Random House edition of Ulysses published in 2002.  The New Yorker no longer gives you online (without subscription) the current issue text and pictures, so I cannot reproduce those lovely covers for you here, but get yourself a copy of the October 17 issue and see for yourself what beauties they are.  

Overall, Updike is not all that pleased with this book--neither its publishing assumptions nor its artistic commentary. So, he notes,

Publishing forms a minor branch of the entertainment industry, and book design is increasingly a matter of fashion-that is, of attention-getting. In the visual clamor of a bookstore, the important thing is to be different; a whisper becomes a shout, and the ugly becomes beautiful if it attracts attention. Yet an utter flaunting of conventional expectations may baffle and repel the public; when the title and the author's name are left off the front of the book, as in three examples taken from the past few years, it sends a subliminal message of contempt for the written word, the product being packaged. (p. 171)

His closing comments run as follows and indicate his own principled view as an author who, we understand, still oversees selection of the book dust jacket cover and print format for his every book issued by Knopf:

In a discussion of some thirdmillennium jackets entirely devoid (except, presumably, on the spine) of lettering, "By Its Cover" speaks of a "sort of broader engagement in which the designers consider their viewers to be participants in the construction of meaning," and of the design "not as an isolated creative act, but as an activity of integrating object, means of reproduction, and audience."

Well, when hasn't it been ever such? A book is an object, a work of manufacture whose many elements, from type and binding to quality of paper, are susceptible to aesthetic criticism (has print, for example, ever been as sharp and clear as it was in the vanished days of letter-press?) but whose meaning has always had to be constructed, as a writer and a reader collaborate in imagining a series of scenes and events. Any artistic creation collaborates with the viewer, reader, or listener, and the present-day designer of books appeals to a sensibility very differently stocked-digitally stocked, as it were-from that of the young book-fancier of fifty years ago. To me as a consumer, the computer-generated jackets and covers have a certain hard-edged coldness and clutter; to me as a book producer, the digital-graphics revolution has the virtue of removing a contemporary illustrator from the equation. Appropriating a Blake watercolor, say, or a Dürer etching or an Ingres painting for the cover's pictorial element puts the text in excellent company without diluting its descriptive authority. Nobody confuses these artists' representations with the author's, but their validated excellence may rub off. There is also a convenience of speed; I once watched over a designer's shoulder while she cropped and enlarged an appropriated painting until it perfectly balanced and fit with the lettering. It was like arriving at "Bingo!" Bingo is still the goal, though the path to it now snakes through a maze of technology and warehoused historical styles and images.

One designer is described as having "combed French and Italian flea markets for ephemera with inspirational typefaces"; a flea-market, rummage-sale sort of aesthetic, traceable to Pop art and especially to Robert Rauschenberg, can be, in the words of the design critic Steven Heller, "deceptively conceptual, giving the impression that a statement exists, when in reality the pseudo-poetic imagery camouflages the fact of a nonexistent point of view." Drew and Sternberger quickly propose that "a 'nonexistent point of view' might have significance in and of itself." Zero is also a number. You can, possibly, tell a book by its cover, but the cover isn't the contents. (p. 172)

[J. Yerkes, 10-17-05]

"Dying for Love," The New Yorker, 7 November 2005: 140-143. Review of Memories of My Melancholy Whores (trans by Edith Grossman; Knopf; $20). Updike also returns to the Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and the short story "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother" (trans. 1978). Calling Márquez "the master of the arresting first sentence," he says the new novel is "a velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate" (pp, 141-142). He notes that the novel "feels less about love than about age and illness" and he closes with this bracing recognition:

"The instinct to memorialize one's loves is not peculiar to nonagenarian rakes; in the slow ruin of life, such memory reverses the current for a moment and silences the voice that murmurs in our narrator's ear, 'No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.' The septuagenarian Gabriel Garcia Márquez , while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light" (p. 143).

[J. Yerkes, 11-7-05]

"Flashy to the Rescue." The New Yorker, 21 November 2005: 94-96.  Review of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman on the March (Knopf; $24).

There are moments when I wonder if Updike did not fall behind in his reviewing when finishing the new forthcoming novel, Terrioist, and is now furiously catching up!  I am not sure because I have not had time to count, but 2005 may be the year in which Updike has reviewed the most books for the New Yorker, along with the art reviews in the NYRBks. At any rate, I can't remember another review of a Frasher novel in the Flashman tradition, but I am doing this in white heat out of a delay caused by family health obligations.  I will check and see if this is the case and let you know later. The book is Flashman on the March (Knopf; $24), George MacDonald Fraser's twelfth book about the Victorian rogue and soldier Falshman.  The review appears in the 21 November 2005 issue of The New Yorker  (pp. 94-96) and presently may be found online at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051121crbo_books .

Updike in his review tells us about Flashman that

"He is the antihero of Empire, the negative of the imperial virtues, printed as a positive in the muddle of battle. The irony weakens, though, in the course of the eleven sequels. To survive and triumph as he invariably does, Flashman must manifest at least two admirable traits: an almost supernatural gift for languages that carries him through many a covert operation, and a winning way with women that does much the same thing" (p. 94).

Updike the cartoonist is reveling in this verbal cartoon on the order of Captain Marvel, Spider Man, and Lil' Abner. That is the impression for me and he obviously enjoyed the reading.

[J. Yerkes, 11-18-05]

2005 ARTICLES

"Beyond Real." The New York Review of Books, 26 May 2005: 4, 6-7.  A review of the Max Ernst exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art held April 7 to July 10, 2005.  The article is attended by two color reproductions of Ernst's paintings, "The Robing of the Bride (1940)"--exceptionally striking,  and "The Entire City (1935-1936)," a landscape of Angkor Wat. The first section of this essay describes the ménage a trois existing between Ernst, Paul Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala.  The last section (4) briefly reports on the soon-to-close exhibit Surrealism USA, at the National Academy of Design Museum.   

[J. Yerkes, 5-10-05]

2005 POEMS

"Bird Caught in My Deer Netting."  American Poetry Review, January/February 2005: 15.

"Elegy for a Real Golfer." American Poetry Review, January/February 2005: 15.  Also published earlier in Van Gogh's Ear: Poetry for the New Millennium,  2004: 188.   Poem in memoriam for Payne Steward.

"Male Voices, From Below." The Atlantic Monthly, March 2005, Volume 295, No. 2: 62.

"Outliving One's Father."  Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Vol. 7, No 2 (Winter 2005): 13-14.  

"Geld."  December 2005.  Marebuch Verlag made available a mini CD bundled with collected poems by John Updike featuring the writer reading his work himself, "a publishing coup, considering Updike is famously reluctant to read in public," says the producer.    

  Click Here to Go Back to Content Links     

 Click Here to Go Back to Updike Home Page      

The materials on this webpage and its section links are copyrighted for literary non-commercial uses.  No other uses of its contents are permitted.