Of the sixty-odd critical volumes devoted to Updike, most are written or edited by Americans. Though a variety of excellent international scholars, including Sylvie Mathé, Judie Newman, Biljana Dojčinović, and Dilvo Ristoff, have published books on Updike, we know relatively little about how scholars and readers from, say, Spain, China, Kenya, and Argentina view his work.

For both American and international critics, Updike and his writing are associated with something quintessentially American. This hardly seems surprising given his creation of “Rabbit” Angstrom. Yet it fails to take into consideration the degree to which Updike is truly a global writer. For instance, as a book critic Updike reviewed more authors from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia than virtually any other American critic; on an annual basis, Updike traveled widely across six continents; he set multiple novels and short stories overseas (The Coup (1978), Brazil (1994), many of his Bech stories); two of his four children married Africans; and his literary influences – Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and Henry Green – were more European than American. Given these circumstances, an international approach to Updike's writings is needed – one that considers how he responded to the world outside the United States, and how that world has responded to him.

The latter is what we find in European Perspectives on John Updike, an excellent new volume edited by Updike scholars Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton. The premise of their study is that “European critics might not be so heavily influenced as their American counterparts by prejudices against Updike's open profession of his religious faith, or by the (misguided) notion that he is politically conservative” (2). The editors are attentive to the question whether it is possible to discern a “distinctly European perspective” when approaching Updike at a time in which nationality plays a smaller role than ever in literary criticism (2).

What is noteworthy about this Eurocentric study of Updike is that its editors are both American (Norton, however, has studied, lived, and taught in Dublin for many years). This may suggest that Americans are even more eager than Europeans to hear what Europeans have to say. That said, Mazzeno and Norton have assembled a strong roster of engaging critics. Approximately half are familiar names in Updike studies: the aforementioned Newman (England), Mathé (France), and Dojčinović (Serbia), along with Brian Duffy (Ireland), Aristi Trendel (France), Eva-Sabine Zehelein (Germany), and Norton (Ireland/the US). The other contributors, all with impressive credentials, have affiliations at a range of European universities: Kasia Boddy from Cambridge University, Teresa Botelho from Nova University in Lisbon, Karin Ikas from Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Ulla Kriebernegg from the University of Graz in Austria, and Andrew Tate from Lancaster University. The essays of these twelve scholars are divided into four thematic sections (aging and time, heterosexual love, faith and religion, and influence), each consisting of three essays.

The volume opens with an examination of Terrorist (2006) by Portuguese critic Teresa Botelho, who approaches the novel not, as so many others have, through politics, religion, or race, but through “the critical lens of the American coming-of-age-as-other narrative” (3). While Updike's protagonist, Ahmad Mulloy, has generated strong criticism for being a mass of stereotypes, Botelho views him as someone very familiar in Updike's oeuvre and American literature. Ahmad is simply “another in a succession of discontented teenage American characters inaugurated by Holden Caulfield, who was equally disgusted at the phoniness of the adult world” (18). By treating Terrorist as a coming-of-age story, Botelho alters the conversation. As an adolescent “in the process of making himself,” Ahmad becomes credible and surely “no more unfathomable than the anarchist terrorists of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels” (18, 23–24).

Another engaging essay in this opening section on aging and time comes from seasoned Updike critic Sylvie Mathé, who considers “the more haunting images in [Updike's] work, in particular those images that reveal a pentimento of death” (45). Though Updike is often treated as a celebratory and sunny writer, Mathé turns our gaze to Updike's “lifelong preoccupation with mortality” (52). As the editors of the volume explain, Mathé maps “Updike's journey into night to sound the grief that, like a basso continuo, accompanies author and readers alike – up to, in Henry James's phrase, ‘the point where the death comes in’” (4).

The section on faith and religion yields some of the volume's most interesting pieces, beginning with Andrew Tate's “Psalmist of the Everyday: Late Updike, Aesthetics, and the Language of Praise.” Tate challenges James Wood's perception that Updike's writing is marked by “a fondness for rest and tranquility that precludes both fervent belief and anguished doubt” (105). Wood, Tate argues, completely misses “the primacy of thankfulness” in Updike (105). Focussing on the author's late fiction (Seek My Face (2002) and “My Father's Tears” (2009)), Tate treats Updike's oeuvre as “an ambivalent act of worship, by turns ecstatic and melancholic and, on occasion, mild or muted” (107). For Tate, Updike's writing “reckons with loss and still sees an ethical need to praise.” There is both discontent and happiness, sorrow and ecstasy as Updike becomes “a psalmist of the everyday” (116).

Biljana Dojčinović steers the religious investigation in another direction by asking, “Is it possible to read, understand, and interpret John Updike's works without making reference to the religious themes within them?” (134). Her answer builds from an examination of Updike's reception in Serbia between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, a period in which discussion of religious meaning in literature was avoided. Dojčinović's essay does something particularly valuable: she details Updike's reception in another country, directing attention toward various translators and local cultural conditions. Such an approach enables us, potentially, to see Updike anew. Discussing religion, politics, and liberty in former Yugoslavia, she “demonstrates how the possibility of receiving Updike as a talented and interesting writer can in some ways be facilitated by religious blindness” (7).

There are many engaging essays in this volume, from Judie Newman's intertextual examination of Gertrude and Claudius (2000) to Brian Duffy's exploration of Updike's portrayal of women (as Madonna, as whore) and misogyny. Nearly every essay is intelligent and useful, and collectively they tell us several things about the current state of Updike studies.

First, critics are interested in more than simply Updike's Rabbit novels. Only two of the volume's twelve essays deal with Rabbit; the majority treat works published during the final decade of his career, such as Terrorist, Gertrude and Claudius, Villages (2004), and Seek My Face.

Second, Updike continues to have a wide international following. As was apparent to all who attended the 2018 Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Belgrade (scholars were present from Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Romania, Russia, Serbia, the UK, and the US), critical interest in Updike has increased since his death in 2009. More books and essays on his writing are now being published, and in some countries, such as Georgia, there has been a recent wave of new translations of his novels.

Third, international scholars have much to tell American critics about Updike, though it remains difficult to articulate, in a collective sense, what an international approach yields that is different from an American treatment. One hopes, however, that this volume will spur on other international studies, perhaps revealing depths and aspects of the author's work heretofore unknown. Clearly, critical readings that arise from local or national conditions, such as Dojčinović's essay on Updike's reception in Serbia, are of particular value. Mazzeno and Norton have opened a door, and one can only hope that others will follow.