Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 23, 2007

John Updike’s sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading “General Considerations,” books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces—reminiscences, friendly forewords, comments on the author’s own recent works, responses to probing questions.

In between, many books are considered, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz. Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk. In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Updike's latest is an endlessly welcoming series of essays—every nonfiction piece he has published in the past eight years—offering Updike's characteristically reasoned perspective on a familiar range of subjects, including Old Masters artwork, literary biography and the history of the New Yorker. The heart of the book is Updike's literary criticism, characterized by a wide lens that summarizes a good portion of an author's output: this collection is invaluable for Updike's generous assessments of contemporaries such as Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk and Alan Hollinghurst. Updike is still at his most vibrant when sexual politics are close at hand, and his summary undressing of David Allyn's history of the sexual revolution, Make Love, Not War, is brilliant in its mingling of personal and social history. As a collection, this is also notable for its high volume of occasional writing: book introductions, short speeches and responses to magazine requests, no matter how ephemeral, are all gathered to overwhelming effect. It is hard to complain about too much of a good thing in this addition to the formidable Updike collection. 25 illus. (Oct. 29)
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From Booklist

Updike is one of the few remaining true men of letters, the kind of writer who is equally at home in almost all forms and formats. Following two other staggeringly incisive, broad-ranging collections of his nonfiction prose, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999), his latest such compilation is, like its predecessors, an elegant leviathan. Books, primarily, are the raison d'etre for these pieces; most are reviews, and most were previously published in Updike's favorite home-away-from-home, the New Yorker. As a critic, Updike has long demonstrated honesty, intelligence, judiciousness, open-mindedness, and never an ounce of superciliousness. For instance, what he writes about Margaret Atwood here is particularly perceptive (especially in his comparison of her to fellow Canadian Alice Munro), and his commentary on Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient may come as a surprise: that the movie version "elucidates the novel and was the clearer, more unified work." Other essays gathered here are of a more personal nature—that is, not geared to book reviewing or to introducing new editions of books. These essays range topically from art and architecture to the author's estimation of his own personal predilections. A lush book to be savored over a long period of time. Hooper, Brad

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307266400
• ISBN-13: 978-0307266408
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #541,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Master Speaks, November 30, 2007

By 

J. Stallings "Jim Stallings" (Milky Way Galaxy, Minor Star, 3rd Planet) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Hardcover)

The master speaks in this latest collection of what Updike calls his freelancing. What a pleasure to survey literature from his perspective. Beautiful language, fascinating views of technique in others' writings, and brilliant, poignant comments on so many times and places in the American experience. Like a modern day Hawthorne, or a latter day Edmund Wilson, we hear the master novelist review recent literature and the times with an extraordinary eye for the moral and aesthetic values of our literary times. As Updike knows full well, he's been lucky in his chosen profession; many are called but few are chosen to stay self-employed as fiction writers over such a long, illustrious career. A member of a vanishing breed in the inditer tribe, we are fortunate to enjoy the mature reflections of this senior scribe.
Rabbit Angstrom : The Four Novels : Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest (Everyman's Library)

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bookend, June 12, 2009

By 

John Van Wagner (Upper Montclair, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Paperback)

It's a heavy book. On the outside of it "Due Considerations" appears as one of those intimidating tomes that sit with stentorian authority on the shelves of academic potentates or literary agents, somewhat worshipped, and rarely opened. It can seem intimidating. One could be tempted to just hold it for a few minutes and savor its weightiness, reflecting on the fact of the treasure one bears: a voluminous collection of essays and criticisms by one of the most prolific and perspicacious men of letters of the twentieth century.

Then open it, and something remarkable happens. Rather than being ushered into a rarefied world of abstract ideas and abstruse language, John Updike welcomes the reader into the warm room of his mind, filled with the rich furnishings of his intimate, personal reflections on the the genius of others. Anyone is welcome. All that's required of a reader of "Due Considerations" is a disposition of curiosity, and a passion for life.

Within minutes you'll find yourself immersed. You can start anywhere--that's one of the many beauties of "Due Considerations". It seems there's not an author, breathing or otherwise, that Updike hasn't read and examined with thoughtful and affectionate precision. Melville, Thurber, Hawthorne, Baum, Beerbaum, English fiction, American fiction, biography, non-fiction, art, other languages--they're all here, spilling over each other despite the editor's obvious attempts to organize and categorize. Life, art, and language, seem, in Updike's loving hands, connected and continuous.

And then there's EB White, and Orhan Pamuk, and Henry Petroski, and oh, yes, did I mention Fernanda Eberstadt? On the way, take a detour into the world of conceptual art, and the modern political situation in China. Updike may have lived a mere 76 years, but he's packed at least five centuries of human experience into his literary soul.

For both serious and casual readers this makes "Due Considerations" a candy store. No doubt for everyone there are a few favorite authors examined here, and the chance to learn of many more. Old friends and new, Updike makes little distinction. He flings open doors on emerging and established artists like an engaging, eager host.

Despite its disparate subjects, Updike's journeys through the human existence do have a central unifying theme, though even he seems reluctant to confront it directly. It's his quest for the spiritual, a longing for the existence and knowledge of God, which seems to compel him most completely, and which eludes him continually. In his exegesis of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" he opines "From the absoluteness of "me" a great deal of religious consolation can be spun. The self is pitted against the vast physical universe as if the two were equal." Is this a statement of fact in his mind, or a deep seated wish? Whichever, his search for the essence of humanity came a long way in his remarkable life, and did its part to move the human psyche closer towards parity with that elusive "absolute self."

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is there anything this Grand Master cannot do?!, December 18, 2007

By 

S. Henkels (Devon, Pa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Hardcover)

This one man literary university seems to out-do even himself, as he reviews a vast assortment of mostly literary works, this time delving into such items as 2 books on the Lusitania sinking, a Turkish Nobel winner (yet still Mr. Updike is an also ran in this contest), lots of foreign authors, most notably perhaps McKeon's "Atonement", and tons more. As always, not a wasted word, so even someone like this reviewer can appreciate and even follow everything written here. Nice to see his comments often intersect with my own thoughts on occasion. And the great thing about this author's review collections is you can always check into them whenever you get the urge, and can "brush up" on simply vast realms of great writing, knowledge, and even fun!