Up, Up With UpdikeYou See Him Wherever You Go

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, it appears that John Updike tells Patti Thorn the inspiration for his latest novel, Terrorist, came as he watched the World Trade Center towers collapse “the day he attended a child’s birthday party” in a Brooklyn Heights apartment: “There was a kind of tinkling, a delicate sound, almost like wind chimes. I suppose it was all the glass shattering. Then, whooomp and dust covering the towers, and the whole island of Manhattan was wailing with sirens.” There’s just one problem with that scenario, in the form of an unsettling question from Bella Stander: “Who has a kid’s birthday party from 8:30-10:30 on a Tuesday morning in September?”

[UPDATE: We checked with Knopf, and there's a simple explanation: Updike did in fact go to Brooklyn for a child's birthday party, and though it wasn't on the morning of 9/11, he was still in the city, and that's when he saw what he saw...and wrote about in the short story "Varieties of Religious Experience." In other words, the News got its timeline wrong.]

That doubting question was a rare jarring note, though, on what can only be described as the Long Updike Weekend, highlighted by Thorn’s profile on Saturday, the cover of Sunday’s NYTBR, and a Monday morning WSJ piece by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg that trumpets Updike’s immunity to bad reviews.

Said immunity certainly came in handy, since this is also the weekend the San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “almost wholly without credibility,” while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes Updike as “out of his element” and the Wichita Eagle, not quite able to sum up its complaints into an outright pan, gamely offers that “Updike is to be commended for using his remarkable talents to seek a better understanding of Muslim individuals and their faith.”

Translation: “Nice try, and you’re lucky I’m taking your legacy into account”—but in all fairness, Glenn Altschuler of Knight Ridder also tries to argue, in the face of clunky plotting and stiff dialogue, that “these imperfections don’t matter much” while praising the book to the skies. It’s the sort of hero worship you see in Thorn’s profile (along with Steven Winn’s SF Chronicle piece, which ran Friday) and to a lesser degree in Robert Stone’s NYTBR review—for that matter, it’s the (let’s be frank) Great Man worship that encouraged the NYTBR to use novels published in 1960 and 1971 to wedge Updike into its narrow shelf of “best” post-1980 American fiction when his actual output during the last 25 years was in danger of failing to make the grade.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.