John Updike

John UpdikeUpdike's first job after studying in England was working as a talk-of-the-town reporter for the New Yorker.He later moved to Massachusetts and wrote the novel "Couples." The book was later made into a movie.Updike uncharacteristically set "The Coup" outside of the U.S. It deals with corruption in an African state. His "Afterlife and Other Stories" is about the beginnings of old age.Updike later became the subject of a book: Nicholson Baker's "U and I."-- A Reader's Guide to Twentieth Century Writers

"Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel," by John Updike. Knopf. 241 pages. $23. John Updike invented Henry Bech in 1970, a curmudgeon of a Jewish writer. Welcome then to Bech in his third fictional incarnation, navigating the shoals of the Manhattan intelligentsia, site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence." Bech at age 76 wins the Nobel Prize, sensing that Updike has been "wanting to set him aside ... get him off his desk forever."In the first of these five novellas, "Bech in Czech," the anti-hero finds himself in Prague.

"Toward The End Of Time," by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf. $25. 342 pages.In John Updike's new speculative novel, "Toward The End Of Time," his 18th, Ben Turnbull, a retired investment counselor, faces the decline of his powers somewhere north of Boston in the year 2020. America has scarcely recovered from a nuclear war with China, the Midwest remaining radioactively uninhabitable. Federal Express is about to relocate the vestiges of the government to Memphis; the dollar has disappeared. To protect their property, people must hire private enforcers.

Here is John Updike's "Ragtime," his 17th novel, a quasi-documentary in which the troubles of the characters are paralleled by real-life events. Mary Pickford struggles on a sweating horse; the Patterson strikers listen in raptures to IWW revolutionary Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Mr. Updike's repressed Protestant men lose their faith.Mr. Updike, an icon of American literary life, falters under this project because history does not in fact interest him. He perceives it as an assault of nature, the unexpected blow of an earthquake or a tornado, immune from the efforts of men to shape it or contain it. Meanwhile his people, as in his more charming marriage stories about the Maples and in the Rabbitt ** novels, are passive, weak and lacking in energy and conviction.

... mainly non fiction. Because I'm in the new stages of a novel of my own, I try to stay away from strong literary voices and stick to non fiction. I just fininshed John Mcphee's "Looking for a Ship" and Paul Theroux's "Old Patagonian Express."I've been reading a lot of science magazines, Scientific American. I read them as a source for metaphors. The new fiction I'm very interested in reading and haven't read are John Updike's "In the Beauty of the Lilies" and Philip Roth's "Sabbath's Theater."

Can you get to Heaven by going through the purgatory of a visit to the dentist? Will the cleaning of your bad teeth also scrape away the stain of sin and bring you closer to God? Are dental hygienists angels of mercy? Or is the experience of undergoing dental work something we wish to forget -- boring at best but all too likely to be excruciating?No fact of physical life is boring to John Updike, a writer whose feeling for language is so sensitive that it can register the splendor in any jot of everyday experience.

"The Biblical Language for Relationships" is the subject of a two-day conference to be held next month at Baltimore's Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation.The public is invited.The program is being arranged in conjunction with a televised seminar in New York that includes discussions with novelist John Updike.The cathedral on University Parkway, between Charles and St. Paul streets, is one of two broadcast sites in Maryland and more than 80 across the nation where there will be opportunities for interaction with the participants in New York.

Title: "Brazil"Author: John UpdikePublisher: KnopfLength, price: 264 pages, $23We are so naked! No animal is as naked as we. In our nearly hairless, thin, shining skins, we are terrifyingly visible. Our hearts are close to the surface. Everything can hurt us.It is true that love can touch us with deep and indelible exquisiteness, but so can pain. Are we, stripped of the surer glory of feathers or fur, ridiculous or beautiful? All human hide is changeable and vague, compared with the ancient, confident coat of animals.

Title: "The Fermata"Author: Nicholson BakerPublisher: Random House-! Length, price: 305 pages, $20One way to talk about Nicholson Baker's books is in terms of their subject matter, and that's easy. "The Mezzanine" (1986), his heavily footnoted first novel, follows an office worker through his lunch hour as he buys shoelaces, uses the men's room, rides escalators and ponders his stapler. The second, "Room Temperature," tracks a father's thoughts as he sits by a window holding his sleeping 6-month-old daughter.

BRAZIL. By John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf. 260 pages. $23.WRITE A score of enthusiastically received novels, break sexual and racial taboos, successfully subvert literary conventions. Soon you might think you can do anything.Only a writer with as many accolades under his belt as John Updike could write a book like "Brazil," the 16th novel by the New England writer and certainly one of his most daring. All at once, "Brazil" seeks to be an interracial love story, a time-shattering fable and a sociological treatise.

Will Phelps squander his public esteem? Of course Michael Phelps deserves a break. But the mere fact that we are having this discussion diminishes him, and that is a problem of his own making ("Not a big deal?" Feb. 3). His acknowledgment of his mistake and acts of contrition (and community service) were perfect after his DUI incident four years ago. They stood apart from the usual athletic "apologies" of the day (which typically took the form of "I'm sorry you were offended by what I did" instead of "I'm sorry for what I did")

The Rabbit is finally at rest. Author John Updike, who died Tuesday of lung cancer at age 76, frequently referred to his most indelible character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, as his alter-ego. In four novels - Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest - Updike chronicled his blue-collar protagonist adrift and disillusioned in mid-20th-century America. The books begin respectively in 1959, 1969, 1979 and 1988, and encapsulate the conflicts of their previous decades: the disenchantment with the American dream of the '50s, the Vietnam War and the hippie movement in the '60s, the conspicuous consumption and hedonism of the '70s, and the rise of drugs and AIDS in the '80s.

The death of John Updike, a brilliant, nuanced and tireless chronicler of ordinary life in America, makes us wonder what Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom would do in the economic crisis now changing the course of millions of lives. Rabbit is Mr. Updike's novelistic everyman whose dreams, crude vanities and fears held up a mirror to our world through four decades. In Rabbit at Rest, Mr. Updike imagines his protagonist, a Pennsylvania car dealer retired to Florida, brooding in the final year of Ronald Regan's presidency.

John Updike, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed an undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died yesterday. He was 76. Mr. Updike's death from lung cancer was announced by Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. Mr. Updike was a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., but the announcement did not indicate where he died. In a career spanning half a century, Mr. Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, as well as collections of poetry.

The Widows of Eastwick By John Updike Knopf / 320 pages / $24.95 It's been 30 years since the three witches haunted the sleepy town of Eastwick, R.I., under the tutelage of the devil incarnate, Darryl Van Horne. In their prime, the three divorcees teased lovers, taunted rivals, explored their sexual and mystical powers and lounged around in Horne's hot tub. But even witches grow old. Do they still have what it takes to make magic? John Updike, one of America's greatest living novelists, reprises the memorable characters from The Witches of Eastwick - Alexandra, Jane and Sukie - in this story about the need to cling to life in the face of deterioration and death.

Due Considerations By John Updike Knopf / 736 pages / $32 Some writers are acquired tastes - the literary versions of anchovies and smelly cheeses. Others are staples - the bread and milk of the literary larder. John Updike is somehow both: so prolific as to be a staple, so frequently arcane as to be an acquired taste. His latest collection of essays and criticism, Due Considerations, is well over 700 pages and contains literary musings on everything but the kitchen sink (although the piece on the longevity of Coco Chanel or the one on coins vs. paper money might qualify as a metaphoric kitchen sink)

Terrorist By John Updike Updike's chilling novel knits together his familiar preoccupations - sex, death, religion. In a slumping New Jersey factory town, 18-year-old Ahmad Mulloy, half-Irish, half-Egyptian, is intoxicated by Islamic radicalism. Prodded by an ambiguous Yemeni imam, Ahmad becomes part of a deadly plot, and it falls to a weary high school counselor to try to pull him back from the edge.

Terrorist John Updike Alfred A. Knopf / 310 pages / $25 The question consumes us, especially since Sept. 11: Who are these terrorists eager to blow up thousands of strangers - and themselves? Who would embrace the unimaginable pain of that kind of death for even a few seconds, becoming merely a splash of blood, a few bits of bone, a sprinkling of ash? In pained bewilderment, we imagine suicide bombers as nearly subhuman, seared by hate and incapable of empathy. Those questions must have haunted the writer John Updike.

Villages, by John Updike. Knopf. 321 pages. $25. John Updike's new, elegiac yet erotic Villages is a portrait of a family man and "a life of bourgeois repose," as the wry omniscient narrator puts it, told over decades. It's the story of Owen Mackenzie, a married-with-children software programmer whose various East Coast places of residence (including Pennsylvania and Massachusetts) are typified by his years in the smallish town of Middle Falls, Conn. Everything about Owen -- from his nuclear family to his two marriages to his well-paying but nondescript job to his just-average places of residence (no "Great" Falls for this character or his creator)

Anyone for waterfalls? During a summer Sunday's family drive, the stream that goes over a cliff -- cool, sparkling, photogenic -- is more than worth a stop-off. And if Pennsylvania has 184 spread-out falls, and New Jersey 30-plus, Maryland's seven are nonetheless among the best. This on the authority of Gary Letcher of Ashton, in his book Waterfalls of the Mid-Atlantic States (Countryman, 245 pages, $17.95). An outdoorsman and an environmentalist, Letcher writes for beginners and experts alike.