An imagined evening in Ipswich, 2008, with John Updike making the case for narcissism as literature.
By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 10, 2025
John Updike spent much of his time writing in the large front living room of the Polly Dole House in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a space that was both his creative sanctuary and a kind of literary crucible. The room itself seemed to vibrate with centuries: wide board floors that sighed in winter, a walk-in fireplace that could, as he liked to say, “singe your eyebrows” when ablaze, a low ceiling where a massive summer beam was suspended precariously by a cable to the roof’s peak. He often joked that if the cable snapped, the whole house might collapse. The furniture never stayed in one arrangement for long; he shuffled chairs and tables as though composition itself demanded fresh angles. “It’s a room you sail through,” he told visitors, a kind of ship’s hold for sentences, always in motion.
On this February afternoon in 2008, the fireplace glowed fiercely, Ipswich’s snow-blanketed silence pressing against the small windows. The marshes beyond were skeletal in winter, the grasses brittle, the sky a pewter dome. Even indoors, the air smelled faintly of brine and woodsmoke. Mary’s paintings hung steady on the walls—domestic scenes, bowls of pears, flowers rendered in clean strokes. They steadied him, he admitted, when his own sentences threatened to shimmer into extravagance. The paintings were ballast, reminders that a bowl of fruit could be only a bowl of fruit, and not always a metaphor for decline.
Updike, in a cashmere sweater, looked less like a titan of American letters than a man who had grown into the furniture. His voice was soft but exact, capable of sudden gleam. He was speaking not to posterity but to a young writer, no older than thirty, who had come with notebook in hand. The visitor was polite but firm, his questions sharpened by a generational impatience: he was both disciple and prosecutor, carrying into this room the skepticism of a literary culture that was leaving Updike behind.
“Mr. Updike,” the young man began, eyes lowered to his notes, “a professor of mine once called you the poet of the ‘suburban libido.’ And even more damningly, he quoted David Foster Wallace, who said you were ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ How do you answer that kind of criticism?”
Updike adjusted his glasses with slow precision, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. “Ah yes, Wallace. God rest him, poor brilliant boy. He wrote as if to kill me, but perhaps what unsettled him was the recognition of kinship. For was not his labyrinth of footnotes also a cathedral of solipsism, though built in a more postmodern stone? I don’t begrudge him the attack. Every generation must rebel against its fathers, even literary ones. Wallace was one of those who never forgave the father for having had a life.”
He chuckled, and the chuckle had an edge. “And as for the ‘penis with a thesaurus’ line—well, if that’s true, at least I found good words for it. Not every organ of man is so lucky.” He let the humor hang before turning serious again. “My work has been called autobiographical, as if that were an insult. But every writer is, in the end, a witness to what he sees. The only crime is to look away.”
The young writer shifted in his chair. “But you’ve also been accused of writing the same man over and over. Rabbit, Piet, Ben Turnbull—they all circle the same hungers.”
Updike gestured toward a small stack of his novels on the table beside him, spines softened with use. “Yes, yes. I’ve been accused of that, and not unfairly. He of the suburban libido, the theological itch, the aesthetic eye. You’re wondering whether narcissism can still find shelter in fiction. I tell you: I never claimed universality. I claimed precision. Fiction is the attempt to make the soul’s contours legible. And the contour nearest to hand was my own. To mine the self is narcissism, yes. But it is also fidelity to the only instrument one can play without faking.”
The visitor leaned forward, eyes bright. “In Rabbit, Run, you wrote: ‘Boys in gymnasiums, men in locker rooms, old men in parks. Rabbit Angstrom is a kind of phantom of all of them, a ghostly echo of their longings.’ Was Rabbit always meant to be more than one man?”
“Exactly,” Updike said, his voice suddenly taut with conviction. “He wasn’t just a man from Mount Judge; he was a vessel for the anomie I saw bubbling in the suburbs. That’s the paradox—solipsism that attempts transcendence. Rabbit’s clumsy pursuit of happiness was, in its way, the national malaise. I didn’t create him so much as observe him, as a naturalist might a specimen. He was an American species.”
The young writer pressed harder. “And in Couples? Piet reflects on his affairs, thinking, ‘Adultery is an ancient, honored pursuit, as fundamental as warfare or the hunt.’ Were you romanticizing it?”
Updike let out a dry laugh. “Romanticizing? No. I was granting it weight. We had spent decades treating infidelity as either sordid soap opera or moral lapse. I wanted to give it the dignity of an old ceremony. Piet’s line—that adultery is as fundamental as war or hunting—is his own self-justification. That’s male narcissism in action: the need to inflate even your sins into something epic. I wasn’t celebrating it; I was documenting the architecture of justification. The lies men tell themselves, dressed in grandeur. The suburban bedroom as battlefield, the marital quarrel as Iliad.”
The fire hissed, logs collapsing into red embers.
“And A&P?” the young man asked. “Critics call it the textbook example of the male gaze. Sammy sees only bodies. At the end he says, ‘I felt my stomach kind of fall as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’ What was he losing?”
“Ah, A&P,” Updike said, shaking his head with something between affection and resignation. “Yes, it distills the gaze perfectly. Sammy was a boy, and I wrote him as a boy. He saw legs and straps and hips, nothing else. That final line—that wasn’t about the girls at all. It was about him. He realized, dimly, that life was going to be hard, that gestures of rebellion change nothing. He quit not for them but for himself. A gesture of self-absorption, yes. But also the moment he glimpsed adulthood’s hardness. Not a moral tale, but a truthful one. Literature traffics in embarrassment. Embarrassment is where truth lives.”
The young writer nodded, but his expression sharpened. “So were you complicit in patriarchy, or were you diagnosing it?”
Updike gazed into the fire, flames mirrored in his glasses. “The America of my prime was a patriarchal house. Men’s appetites were its furniture. Women became catalysts, erotic stimuli, rather than agents. Feminist critics are right to point out the lack of female interiority in much of my work. Was I complicit or diagnostic? The question dogs me. If I made male blindness beautiful in prose, did I dignify it? I hoped the irony would be visible, that readers would cringe as much as they thrilled. But subtlety is a gamble. One generation’s irony becomes the next’s sin.”
“And in The Witches of Eastwick?” the young man asked. “You gave women power. Jane, Sukie, Alexandra. One of them thinks, ‘I can turn a man to a pig with a flick of my wrist.’ Was that your reply to the critics?”
“Perhaps, in part,” Updike conceded. “I was tired of being seen only as the chronicler of male discontent. I wanted to enter another consciousness, a sororal one. The witches were my attempt to grant women the agency I had given men. That line—turning a man to a pig—was their fantasy of revenge, but also of freedom. It was wild, wicked, legitimate. I wanted to honor that. Did I succeed? Perhaps incompletely. But it was an effort. And Harold Bloom told me he liked it only because it was the only one of mine he had read. That was Bloom for you—compliment and insult in a single breath.”
The young writer flipped pages, relentless. “In Rabbit Redux, when Rabbit watches the moon landing, you wrote: ‘The light of the television seemed more real than the light in his own room.’ What did you mean?”
“That was the paradox of American life,” Updike said. “We watched men walk on the moon, a triumph of ingenuity, and yet our own lives—our marriages, our bodies—felt less real. The glow of the television outshone the lamp beside us. Rabbit felt that dislocation acutely. The moon landing should have enlarged him, but it diminished him. We were ghosts in our own homes, realities filtered through a glowing screen. I wanted to capture that precise sense of disembodied awe. And does it not feel familiar now, in your age of laptops and phones? Screens more vivid than windows?”
The young writer hesitated, then asked softly, “Why always the self? In Self-Consciousness you wrote about your stutter, your psoriasis. You said, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ Is that why you always circled back to yourself?”
Updike’s face softened. “Yes. For me it wasn’t choice, it was compulsion. My stammer, my psoriasis—they were my apprenticeship. The small shames became my lens. I wrote, ‘A writer is someone who has to write, to live inside a world he has to make.’ My world was the one I inhabited—my own skin, my anxieties. You cannot separate the eye from what it sees. My narcissism, if you call it that, was the attempt to see as clearly as I could with the only two eyes I had. I often said writing was how I made a living that did not inflict pain on others. Perhaps it inflicted too much on myself.”
The fire had dwindled to coals, the room dusky in the winter twilight. Outside, the Ipswich marshes were turning violet under snow. The house groaned as the wind pressed against its beams.
The young writer posed one last question. “And at the end of Rabbit at Rest, you describe him as ‘a man who has lost his way, and his words, and his breath.’ Was that your fear? Of obsolescence?”
“Of course,” Updike replied softly. “Rabbit’s death was my rehearsal. The loss of words, of breath—that was my dread. His end was my imagined end. Yes, narcissism complete: my life, my anxieties, poured into him. But I hoped it was also communal—a glimpse of what it feels like to burn down to an ember. That’s what a writer does. We try to make monuments of our sputtering light.”
It was 2008, and the literary world outside this Puritan house was changing fast. Wallace would not live out the year. Autofiction was rising, bare prose shorn of ornament, the self on display without metaphor. Younger readers wanted irony stripped to confession. Updike sensed the shift, the way a man senses the ground softening beneath his shoes. His sentences, once radiant as stained glass, now looked to some like ornate furniture in an age of collapsible chairs. He knew it, and yet here he sat, defending not the verdict of critics but the practice of witness itself.
The house creaked again, the fragile beam above holding. Updike turned his gaze toward the window, where dusk had pressed its purple weight against the marsh. His voice was almost a whisper now.
“Call it narcissism if you must. I call it witness. A man at his window in a Puritan house, describing, as honestly and as beautifully as he could, what it felt like to be alive—before the beam gave way, before time snuffed the flame.”
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI
