Authors
John Updike (b. 1932)
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Updike’s novels are The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963), Of the Farm (1965), Couples (1968), Rabbit Redux (1971), A Month of Sundays (1975), Marry Me (1976), The Coup (1978), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Roger’s Version (1986), S. (1988), Rabbit at Rest (1990), Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), Brazil (1994), In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Toward the End of Time (1997), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Seek My Face (2002), Villages (2004), and Terrorist (2006). Collections of short fiction are The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), Olinger Stories: A Selection (1964), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979), Problems (1979), Bech Is Back (1982), Trust Me (1987), The Afterlife (1994), Bech at Bay (1998), and Licks of Love (2000). Stories from 1953 to 1975 are presented thematically in The Early Stories (2003). Updike’s poems are gathered in Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993), drawing on the individual volumes The Carpentered Hen (1958), Telephone Poles (1963), Midpoint (1969), Tossing and Turning (1977), and Facing Nature (1985); Americana: and Other Poems (2001) is newer work. Reviews and literary essays appear in Assorted Prose (1965, Picked- Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), Odd Jobs (1991), and More Matter (1999). Self- Consciousness (1989) is a memoir, Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005) are art criticism, and Golf Dreams (1996) collects the author’s essays on his favorite sport. Buchanan Dying (1974) is a play meant for reading rather than for stage production. Updike has authored five books for children: The Magic Flute (1962), The Ring (1964), A Child’s Calendar (1965), Bottom’s Dream (1969), and A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1995). Donald J. Greiner’s thorough examination of the early canon appears in his John Updike’s Novels (1984) and The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Plays (1981). Longer views are taken by James A. Schiff in John Updike Revisited (1998) and by William Pritchard in Updike: America’s Man of Letters (2000). Peter J. Bailey pursues theological matters in Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction (2006).
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, John Updike began his long, distinguished career writing for The New Yorker magazine soon after graduating from Harvard. Much of his fiction focuses on everyday middle-class people in the midst of their everyday lives, with many of his famous short stories set in a fictional small town, Olinger, which is reminiscent of his hometown of Shillington. Updike's "Rabbit" novels, each of which manages to sum up an era of twentieth-century America, represent perhaps the best of his long fiction. These novels follow Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and America from the 1950s (Rabbit, Run), to the late 1960s (Rabbit Redux), to the gasoline crisis of 1979 (Rabbit Is Rich), to the end of the Reagan years (Rabbit at Rest). Among Updike's many other books are Olinger Stories (1964), Couples (1968), Roger's Version (1986), and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
As a fiction writer, Updike is often thought of as a latter-day realist or naturalist, in a tradition that includes Wharton, Fitzgerald, Cheever, and Paley. But to see how Separating (1975) stands apart from a legion of tales about "middleness," separations, divorce, and the failure of love, it helps to start from both the beginning and the end of this narrative and work toward the "middle."
1. What risks are inherent in closing a story like Separating with a question such as "Why?" Can a story about a middle-class suburban family bear the weight of a question like that? What does the young boy mean by that question--and what does his father hear in it?
2. From the story's opening pages, choose two passages, one of descriptive narrative, one of human speech. What kinds of details does Updike pack into his opening paragraph, and why? What kinds of language, what vocabularies, are Joan and Richard using when they speak to each other? What are the effects of those word choices? If this is a couple encumbered, and perhaps undone, by the bric-a-brac of ordinary routine, acquisitions, and professional aspirations, are they encumbered also by a baggage of English words?
3. If you have read Wharton's Souls Belated, review that story with an ear for the words that are used there in tense, important conversations; then speculate on ways in which American realists, bygone and contemporary, understand language as central to the fabric of reality.
