John Updike Wrote More Than At the A&P

"At the A&P" has passed from the pages of the New Yorker, where I first read it for pleasure, into anthologies that are now required reading in high schools and colleges.

But don't let that trajectory deter you from looking for more of John Updike's books and stories. Reading Updike is reading for fun. When Updike was young, he promised himself he would publish a book a year. That's what he's done, including volumes of essays and poems as well as stories and novels.

Early in John Updike's career, as you can see in his collection titled Telephone Poles, he wrote as a poet not frightened of nonsense. He published playful, funny poems fooling around with sounds. The one I have never forgotten, based on a real headline Updike placed above his poem, begins:

ROGER BOBO GIVES RECITAL ON TUBA:

Eskimos in Manitoba,

Barracuda off Aruba,

Cock an ear when Roger Bobo

Starts to solo on the tuba...

Who says poetry (and writing poetry) is for sissies?

As a novelist, Updike is well-known for his series that started with Rabbit, Run (1960), followed by four more Rabbit novels. The scene I remember best from RR is the one when Rabbit, a married human being, and a friend visit a whorehouse. Starting with "At the A&P," reading Updike was where I peeked or peered at other people's sexual attitudes.

John Updike, who is a fiend for detail, seems to write almost effortlessly (although probably he works hard to do so). In writing his Rabbit books, he covers several decades of 20th century American social history but for the reader, this panorama unrolls without effort, no teacher needed.

A much more recent novel is Seek My Face (2002), this time about an artist born in the 1920s who is a woman. Updike went to art school in England for a year before deciding writing was his vocation, so the reader can expect to learn (or recognize) not only the mid-2oth century art scene in New York but also details about the art of painting. Hope, the main character in this short novel, is as carefully brushed as Rabbit was in five volumes.

Probably no reader would like every Updike novel. He is a writer who has not been afraid to write for different audiences, but there is something for almost everyone. His blockbuster Couples, full of sexual combinations and permutations, sold so well it probably underwrote the rest of his life. Stories about Bech, a Jewish writer, fill three volumes. In the novel S, the main character joins a sect like the resembling the Raj Neesh community of the 1980s. Other novels rewrite Greek myths as if they were occurring in a small Pennsylvania town very much like Shillington, Pennsylvania where Updike grew up.

To sum up, if you are young and starting with "At the A&P," check in later for others you'll like as you get older. If you're the grandparent of teenagers, the A&P story is a fine place to begin if you missed it. If you're a writer, pick up any of Updike's books or reviews in the New Yorker. And if you're hungering for a good read for a rainy night, head for the U's at your local library.