Comments on: John Updike and William S. Burroughs

By: Christopher Koy

Christopher Koy — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:29:44 +0000

Updike did write one novel about a woman attempting to escape materialism and domestic life (she joins an ashram in Arizona) after leaving her husband. The problem is that she never fully leaves her domestic WASP life behind her. I am referring to “S.” (1988), an epistolary novel which was inspired in part by the 1980s ashram led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Antelope, Oregon (the same cult depicted in the Nexflix series “Wild Wild Country” in 2016). Sarah P. Worth never stops worrying about her North Shore Boston house and garden, her daughter “Pearl” attending an Ivy League school or the performance of her stocks on Wall Street. She remains “attached” to money and sometimes seems to echo the behavior of Ma Anand Sheela (exploiting people, swindling donors, stealing funds, arming security guards and drugging sannyasins). Updike was very disappointed with both the sales and harsh criticism of “S.” which he thought displayed a strong female character. (Apparently, he had hoped the novel would please feminists, traditionally among his harshest critics.) No matter how hard he tried, Updike could not stop that “bad mojo.”

By: James Ward

James Ward — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 02:45:30 +0000

Oh my word I would like to second these sentiments.. I too have only read Rabbit Run, of Updike (that I remember) and I too only seek the mythic.. Updike can keep the mundane..

By: Elizabeth Hann

Elizabeth Hann — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 06:23:02 +0000

I think that you’re a great writer, and that this is a great, witty, fascinating article. I love your line, “I will take the mythic over the domestic”; that’s good enough to be a one-line manifesto (and I’ll always take the mythic over the domestic myself). And I like your idea of having an author who’s your own personal “anti-Burroughs”, someone who you consider to be as unlike Burroughs as possible. I must say, I think my own personal anti-Burroughs is Mary Oliver. With her appearances in OPRAH magazine, her squeaky-clean, ready-to-be-emblazoned-on-a-coffee-mug sentiments, her sweetly tame (tamely sweet) odes to the wonder of nature, written in (what I consider to be) a very slack, un-rhythmic, uninteresting free verse (I like most free verse, of course, and I write free verse myself, but Oliver writes the sort of free verse that reads like prose that doesn’t go all the way across the page, you know what I mean; she comes off like she gives no thought whatsoever to how her poems will sound when read aloud, which I think is a lethal flaw in a poet) her seeming refusal to ever play or experiment with the English language, Oliver just strikes me as being a million miles away not just from Burroughs but from any sort of Beat sensibility at all. She’s anti-Beat. I owe a lot of my ideas about good poetry, and what I want my own writing to do, to the Beats (primarily Burroughs – even though Burroughs is remembered primarily as a novelist, I read his novels, especially the cut-up novels, as if they were novel-length poems – but Allen Ginsberg as well), so for me, Mary Oliver’s writing stands as the ultimate exemplar of bad poetry, of everything I don’t want poetry to do, and of what I don’t want my own poetry to sound like. I don’t own any of Mary Oliver’s books (so there’d be no danger of accidentally contaminating my Burroughs books by putting one of hers next to them) but I had to read some of Oliver’s poetry in school, and it just about made me sick.
I’d never thought much one way or the other about John Updike before I read your article, so that was interesting. I laughed when I read that you thought of Updike as the “…crew-cut , Ivy League advertising exec type fruit” from the first chapter of NAKED LUNCH; I thought that was hilarious. Now I’ll never be able to hear Updike’s name again without thinking of those lines; ha ha ha!