James Yerkes

James Yerkes is a retired professor of religion and philosophy who lives in Surry, Maine. He is the editor of John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Eerdmans).

Articles by James Yerkes

Books

Villages

John Updike

It takes a village

Dec 28, 2004 reviewed by James Yerkes
When Knopf advertised Updike’s novel as “a Bildungsroman describing the education, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie,” critics knew that the ending would be the crux of the literary proposal. Not that the “getting there” would be irrelevant. But the literary and moral value of the story would depend on where the journey ended.
Books

The Early Stories, 1953-1975

John Updike

Saying the unsayable

Dec 13, 2003 reviewed by James Yerkes
Exploring the extraordinary ordinary dimensions of our lives has always been John Updike’s métier, in which he is peerless among American mid-20th-century writers. His writings, perhaps his short stories most powerfully, relentlessly expose a predictable dialectic: “Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear—these are the worthy dynamic subjects.
Books

Beyond a doubt

Oct 09, 2002 by James Yerkes

Seek My Face: A Novel. By John Updike. Knopf, 274 pp., $23.00.

Books

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say), by Frederick Buechner

Dec 19, 2001 reviewed by James Yerkes

If this is not Frederick Buech­ner's valedictory volume it surely could be, given the pathos of his "Afterword": "If somebody a while back had offered me a thousand more years, I would have leapt at it, but at this point I would be inclined to beg off on the grounds that . . .

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