Famed for his silken prose and razor-sharp portrayals of American middle-class malaise, John Updike (1932–2009) remains one of the literary giants—and lightning rods—of the 20th century. His Rabbit series stands as a towering achievement, tracing the uneasy decline of postwar masculinity with both intimacy and unsparing detail. Elsewhere, he turned his discerning eye toward adultery, faith, art, and aging, chronicling the inner lives of his characters with a precision that could feel at once reverent and merciless.
But in the years since his death, Updike’s legacy has grown more complex, even contentious. Critics and readers alike now ask: Did the sheer brilliance of his style mask a certain thematic narrowness? Were his lush sentences and psychological insights ultimately confined to the worldview of a privileged few? Such questions have sparked fresh debate about his rightful place in the literary canon.
One of the sharpest voices in this conversation is Biljana Dojčinović, a scholar whose work pushes beyond easy categories. A professor of literary studies with expertise in Anglo-American modernism, Dojčinović brings a distinctly transnational lens to Updike’s fiction, interrogating how his narratives handle (or mishandle) issues of gender, power, and identity. Rather than slotting him neatly into the roles of either misunderstood genius or emblem of patriarchal excess, she urges readers to sit with the contradictions—those moments where Updike is most dazzling, and most troubling. Her scholarship doesn’t just revisit Updike; it reopens him, asking what his work can still mean in an age more attuned to the voices he too often left on the margins.
Charles Carlini: Updike’s prose is often called “beautiful” even by his critics. But do you think his stylistic brilliance has sometimes served as a shield—deflecting deeper scrutiny of his themes or biases?
Biljana Dojčinović: No, I don’t think so. I believe Updike did scrutinize everything he—or rather, his characters—were interested in or shaped by. When it comes to biases, we need to be careful not to confuse the author with his characters, nor with the assumptions and prejudices we ourselves bring to the reading experience. What do we really expect from a story, a poem, a novel? Do we understand that works of art and literature are not the same as reality? For those who can’t—or won’t—acknowledge that distinction, much of art and literature is bound to be a disappointment.
CC: The Rabbit novels are lauded for capturing American masculinity in crisis. Yet some argue they conflate “universal” struggles with a very specific (white, heterosexual, middle-class) experience. Where do you land in that debate?
BD: My first encounter with Updike was through a Serbo-Croatian translation of Rabbit, Run back in the 1970s. I was a 15-year-old girl living in Yugoslavia—a socialist country, though not behind the Iron Curtain. I simply fell for the style (the translation was so good that I could sense the mastery of the writing), especially his attention to detail and the way he wove a net of meaning out of those details. I was also drawn to his characters’ yearning for freedom—for liberation from a fixed set of social rules—and their torment over those impossible “either-or” situations. I’ve remained deeply interested in his work ever since.
So where do I stand—as a white, heterosexual, atheist woman born in a socialist country, middle-class but in a different way than what that means in the U.S., who, through political upheavals, lost her original country, her class position, and who eventually outgrew her youthful ideals while sharpening and embracing a feminist awareness along the way?
In other words, I suppose my geopolitical and social differences offer compelling evidence of the universality of the Rabbit stories. Updike created Rabbit as a character in search of answers any of us might ask ourselves. Each one of us is looking for what Rabbit calls “it”—something we can’t quite define—and while our circumstances may differ, the longing, the struggle, the ache of that search is what draws us to the story of someone else’s.
CC: Updike famously said, “The artist’s duty is to be a witness to his time.” But can a witness also be complicit—say, in reinforcing the very power structures he observes?
BD: I suppose a writer can be complicit, but I don’t think Updike is. It’s no coincidence that all great literary works are, in some way, critical of the times they depict. When a writer speaks from a certain distance, it creates space for us to reflect on what we’re reading. In the modernist style, there’s no guiding authorial voice—it’s up to us to decide what’s right or wrong. That can be challenging; irony, for instance, is often missed. And when that happens, the meaning of a work can be lost entirely.
CC: Your work examines gender dynamics in Updike’s fiction. Is there a particular female character you think defies his alleged misogyny—or one that epitomizes its pitfalls?
BD: As we talked about the Rabbit series, I found myself thinking of Janice Angstrom’s development—from a victim of Harry’s selfishness into a strong woman whose growth mirrors the broader evolution of women’s roles in society. Put like that, it might sound like a kind of program, but the Rabbit novels don’t prescribe; they describe. They capture the social context of their time.
Many of Updike’s female characters challenge the accusation that he was a misogynist—it’s the society that works against women, not the writer who portrays it. If we’re looking for female characters who are strong and push back against social expectations and gender roles, then every mother he created fits that description: take Mary Angstrom, Mary Robinson from Of the Farm, or the mothers in his short stories. They might not be pleasant if they were real people, but they are certainly compelling and inspiring as literary characters.
CC: Updike’s treatment of sexuality was groundbreaking for its era, but now often reads as dated or objectifying. How should we reconcile historical context with present-day critiques?
BD: Let’s go back to James Joyce and recognize that this kind of breakthrough happened well before Updike. When we read literature from earlier periods—or even from different cultures—we need to stay mindful of the contextual differences. More than that, we should make an effort to learn about those contexts. Take slang, for example—it’s clear we shouldn’t apply contemporary meanings to a title like The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. And yet, we often impose our present-day values and interpretations onto works from the past or from unfamiliar cultures. That’s where many misunderstandings begin.
CC: Critics like David Foster Wallace accused Updike of “moral blindness.” Do you see that as a fair charge—or a misreading of his project?
BD: I believe I’ve already touched on this when discussing the modernist style. In any case, morality and immorality in literature aren’t the same as in real life. Readers also bear some responsibility for how they engage with a book or story—it’s often their own biases, or a lack of reading skills or contextual knowledge, that lead to confusion.
CC: Updike’s faith (and doubt) permeate his work. Yet his religious characters often feel trapped rather than transcendent. Did he ultimately view spirituality as a consolation or a contradiction?
BD: If it has to be an either-or question, I’d say contradiction. If it were consolation, I probably wouldn’t have been drawn to Updike’s work in the first place. He’s a writer, not a preacher. Literature thrives on doubt, entrapment, suspicion, contradiction…
CC: If Updike were writing today, what subject do you think would compel him—and where might he clash with contemporary sensibilities?
BD: If Updike were writing today, maybe Rabbit would still be with us. I hesitate to imagine what Rabbit’s political choices might be now. But even that thought reminds me just how complete the series was—how fully the characters’ fates were rounded out. Perhaps in stories about very old age, which Updike himself never lived to write, some characters might have taken on extremely conservative views. In any case, reality would still serve as the backdrop to that literature. Then again, I wonder if there’s any point in speculating at all.
CC: Your scholarship spans European and American literature. How does Updike’s work “translate” (or falter) when read through a non-U.S. lens?
BD: Updike was extremely popular in 1970s socialist Yugoslavia, thanks in large part to his brilliant translator, Aleksandar Petrović. When Updike visited Yugoslavia in 1978, he was treated like a celebrity. His novel Couples, for instance, was published as part of a prestigious series of world literature classics—alongside The Magic Mountain and War and Peace.
By 2006, fourteen of his novels had been translated into Serbo-Croatian (the official language of Yugoslavia at the time) or Serbian. The first stories appeared in translation in 1966—a selection from The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers. This selection was partially republished in 2004, with several new stories added. Around 1980, there was also a selection from the Maple stories published. Since then, only Rabbit, Run has been reprinted, and that was in 2018, when The John Updike Society held a conference in Belgrade, with Ian McEwan as the opening speaker. None of the other Rabbit books have been reissued since.
All of this clearly suggests that Updike’s popularity among general readers has declined. Yet his work has found a lasting home in literary studies here—at least among my students. His early stories are especially compelling to them: “Pigeon Feathers,” “Friends from Philadelphia,” “A&P.” And Rabbit, Run, of course. As I mentioned earlier, the themes—freedom, love, death, the experience of maturing in a hostile society—are universal. They persist, despite everything we were taught in the past decades.
Religion, by contrast, wasn’t really part of public discourse in socialist-era Serbia and Yugoslavia—and yet Updike was widely read and admired here. Which suggests that other aspects, both in content and in form, were recognized and appreciated.
CC: Literary reputations rise and fall. A century from now, what single aspect of Updike’s work do you think will still demand our attention?
BD: It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like in 2125. I only hope it won’t resemble the one in Toward the End of Time. If humanity and humanism manage to endure—and I truly hope they do—then Updike may still be of interest, if only because he was such a precise witness of his time. But more than that, I think he’ll be read for his love of detail, which remains essential to both life and art.
Let me close with a quote from one of his early stories, “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” where the narrator reflects on the difference between an outline and a story:
“This is the outline; but it would be the days, the evocation of the days . . . the green days. The tasks, the grass, the weather, the shades of sea and air. Just as a piece of turf torn from a meadow becomes a gloria when drawn by Dürer. Details. Details are the giant’s fingers. He seizes the stick and strips the bark and shows, burning beneath, the moist white wood of joy.”
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