On Rereading John Updike's Rabbit Quartet

Julian Barnes takes a fresh look at John Updike's Rabbit Quartet and finds he still thinks it is the greatest postwar American fiction. "Running Away" The Guardian, 17 October 2009.

Excerpt:

"When a writer you admire dies, rereading seems a normal courtesy and tribute. Occasionally, it may be prudent to resist going back: when Lawrence Durrell died, I preferred to remain with 40-year-old memories of The Alexandria Quartet rather than risk such lushness again. And sometimes the nature of the writer's oeuvre creates a problem of choice. This was the case with John Updike. I have only ever met one person – a distinguished arts journalist – who has read all Updike's 60-plus books; most of us, even long-term fans, probably score between 30 and 40. Should you choose one of those previously unopened? Or go for one you suspect you misread, or undervalued, at the time? Or one, like Couples, which you might have read for somewhat non-literary reasons?"

Read the rest of Barnes's thoughts on Updike at The Guardian.

Julian Barnes on John Updike's final works

Julian Barnes writes about John Updike's final works in "Flights" for The New York Review of Books, 11 June 2009.

From the Essay:

Hearing of John Updike's death in January of this year, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest—"But I thought we had him for another ten years"; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature, the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world.
Though it was not as if he hadn't left us enough to read. For years now his lifelong publishers at Knopf have been giving back-flap approximations. In the mid-1990s, in a cute philoprogenitive linking, he was "the father of four children and the author of more than forty books." By the time of The Early Stories (2003) they had him, in a hands-in-the-air sort of way, as "the author of fifty-odd previous books." Now, with Endpoint, they award him "more than sixty books".

My Father's Tears and Other Stories is available from Knopf and Hammish Hamilton. The Maples Stories is published by Everyman's Library.

Julian Barnes Remembers John Updike

Julian Barnes writes about reading the Rabbit Tetralogy during a three-week book tour in America. Read the full post on The New Yorker website's "Remembering John Updike".

Excerpt: "Like many others, I've regularly taken Ruskin's The Stones of Venice with me to Venice, and regularly failed to read a word of it there. That reader's hoped-for matching of text to place frequently disappoints. But once, a dozen or so years ago, it worked miraculously for me. I was setting out on a three-week book tour, crisscrossing America. At Heathrow I bought Rabbit, Run and started it on the plane. All reading problems became reading joys for the entire trip."