📚 Roth-Updike Conference Presentation: Thoughts

In October 2025, I presented on Roth and Updike's fictionalized characters that serve as stand-ins for themselves. Below is the abstract: 

          John Updike’s (not-so-)autobiographical protagonist Henry Bech is a lot of things that Updike is not. He’s often dubbed the “anti-Updike,” despite going on adventures that largely resemble Updike’s own. In a recent article for the John Updike Review, I wrote about Updike’s anxiety about biography, the desire to control his image and distance himself from the character. Interestingly, Philip Roth’s anxieties surrounding biography are similar in some ways to Updike’s: he sought so much to control his biography that he wound up providing copious notes to his chosen biographer. What is interesting, however, is the way this anxiety manifests in their writing in different ways, though similar on the surface. While Updike tried to distance himself from his stand-in, Roth invited comparison to and even confusion with his characters, going so far as to name one of them Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, and to call the book a confession, rather than a novel. The connection, though, is that both writers have a recurring character that serves as a stand-in for themselves, and Roth even has one that also provides a pseudo-distance from himself: Updike has Henry Bech, Roth has Nathan Zuckerman. 

          In this presentation, I want to compare the significant differences in how each writer handles conflation with their characters. To do so, I will focus primarily on two instances in which fiction and nonfiction collide, when Roth and Updike speak directly to, and through, their characters: for Updike, the review in which “Henry Bech” interviews Updike on his latest book Rabbit Redux, and for Zuckerman, his correspondence with Philip Roth in The Facts. Both interactions are specifically about the authors’ work, and, taken together, might illuminate more about each author’s ideas about the self and what it means to be a writer.