John Updike

Yesterday on The New York Times' Paper Cuts book blog, Times Book Review and 'Week in Review' editor Sam Tanenhaus took a look at James Wood's How Fiction Works, specifically, Mr. Wood's critique of John Updike.

As Mr. Tanenhaus writes, "Wood suggests that Updike’s fiction doesn’t work very well at all, in part because Updike’s prose, like Vladimir Nabokov’s, is oversaturated with pointillist descriptions that, Wood objects, 'freeze detail into a cult of itself.'" He then goes on to quote a particularly florid passage from Mr. Updike's Of the Farm, which Mr. Wood thinks is "an exaggeration of the noticing eye."  read more »

You know exactly what you’re going to get when you open the latest New Yorker (March 24, $4.50) and see an excerpt from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which is due out in mid-May, a few weeks after the release of Mr. Morris’ documentary of the same name. It’s a recurring nightmare, starring Specialist Sabrina Harman—the MP with the camera—and the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A of the military intelligence block at Abu Ghraib. The account is direct, detailed and unambiguous in its implications. Is there any part of the passage below that’s in any way unclear?  read more »

The first time John Updike met the late Norman Mailer was in 1964, after a literary function in New York intended to ease Cold-War tensions by bringing together Soviet and American writers.

"[Mailer] came up to me on the street," Mr. Updike told The Observer in a phone interview Sunday. "It was kind of dark, a little spooky. I'm enough of a rural type to get easily spooked in New York City. He said to me, 'Are you really John Updike?' I swore that I was, and he said, 'You're so handsome! I can’t believe you're so handsome.' He was a visionary, I think, to see this in me. I think he was a bit drunk at the time."

Keep in mind this took place after Mailer wrote that piece in Esquire where he said Mr. Updike's writing reminded him of "stale garlic." Apparently, Mr. Updike didn't hold a grudge: "I didn't mind what he said about me," he said. "I thought it was kind of nice."

John Updike’s eighth fat collection of nonfiction brings to mind a variation on a game: What is the slenderest sliver of ephemeral writing that Mr. Updike will preserve between hardcovers?  read more »