House of Days: Poems

Henry Holt & Co, 1998. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. Association copy, inscribed on the front end free paper: "For John Updike, with endless admiration for you work. Jay Parini. Oct 2, 1998." Laid in is a note on a approx. 3 x 5 inch card, Parini's personal stationary with his address: "Oct 2, Dear Mr. Updike, Sorry to miss you when I visit Salem. I wanted you to have this book of mine--the cover (by Lincoln Perry -- Ann Beattie's husband) the best thing about it. That's my wife, Devon, in front of your house! Warmest regards, Jay." Not positive, but seems like this is Updike's childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania; Parini is from Pennsylvania, and in his book he writes about his past in PA's coal-mining country. This story gets richer, because apparently Parini and Updike would trade some critical jabs the very next year. From a Salon article: "In the Dec. 10 [1999] edition of London's Times Literary Supplement, novelist and biographer Jay Parini gave novelist and critic John Updike's 'More Matter: Essays and Criticism' a rather slighting review. While he praised Updike as 'the prodigal phrase-maker,' he also buried him: 'With so much intelligence and linguistic richness at his disposal, his criticism is largely inconsequential.' . . . Review watchers may recall that earlier this year, in the March 15 New Yorker, Updike unleashed some rather slighting criticism of his own on Parini's 'Robert Frost: A Life.' 'A poet and fiction writer as well as a literary scholar, Parini strikes some nice phrases, Updike began. Then he turned harsh: 'But a certain blandness, even lameness, of style suggests that Parini wearied more than once during the long traverse across the wide scree of accumulated Frost data.' Ouch, and ouch. Pretty fun. Jay Parini has written about Updike on other occasions, and perhaps all was forgiven because he penned a tribute upon Updike's death for the anthology John Updike Remembered. This volume, House of Days, "address[es] the environmental and spiritual crises that afflict us in the late twentieth century." The final sequence in the book is devoted to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Card has a faint vertical crease. Fine book in fine jacket.