Updike doesn't interest me. I could never read him. (I feel the same way about Norman Mailer and, well, pretty much every American writer of that generation.) It sometimes interests me that others can.
Patricia Lockwood has written a piece on John Updike. I found it via Marginal Revolution where the link is labelled "Anti-Updike". The review itself is kind of vague. You get a sense that Lockwood has problems with Updike but can't quite find words to adequately describe it but keeps trying.
(I'm guessing, perhaps incorrectly, that Lockwood has managed to thwart the rules and write her own Wikipedia entry. Then again, perhaps a devoted fan who has completely internalized Lockwood's style wrote it. In any case. it has the same lyrical feeling—long on feeling, short of facts or logic—that the review has. Part of me admires her for pulling this trick off.)
In any case, the sense I get is that women of Lockwood's generation have mixed feelings about Updike. They seem to loathe him and yet they also seem to read an awful lot of his stuff. Is he a convenient bête noire for them? I suspect so. I get the same feeling reading Lockwood on Updike that I get hearing people complain about relatives whom they, nevertheless, keep visiting.
I sometimes wonder which one of my parents read John Updike. I know that one of them did because there was a copy of Rabbit, Run in one of the bookcases in our house. I picked it up in Grade 8 and didn't read it. I tried, driven by a blurb that promised that the writing about sex was especially good. As it turned out, the sex writing was what put me off. I had zero experience at the time and yet I was firmly convinced that this was bogus sex.
I know that John Updike must have actually had sex at some point in his lives but his attempts at describing it in Rabbit, Run are ludicrously off and so are the various bits I've seen quoted in reviews. If a guy started talking about sex the way Updike writes about it, I'd assume the man was a virgin.
Then again, maybe he wrote about sex the way members of his generation experienced it. Perhaps sex was such a fantastically transgressive act for those who grew up before the sexual revolution that the ridiculous writing Updike did about it was the only way to capture something of the feeling? Wittgenstein impishly suggested at one point that if you think we can't describe the smell of coffee because we lack the words you should try making up new words and see if that works any better. That implicit warning would have been lost on Updike as he plunged ahead and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote about sex. And the result was apparently highly readable for my parents' generation and completely unreadable for me. David Foster Wallace's attack on Updike struck lots of other people as unfair and unbalance but I thought it perfect.
Which brings back the question of which of my parents read him. By the time I reached adolescence, my father, like a lot of men, read non-fiction. He may have still been reading fiction when Rabbit, Run was first published, the year I was one and four years before David Foster Wallace was born. The copy in our house was a paperback and it may have come out a year or two after the initial publication. In any case, it may have been a time when my father was still reading fiction. If he did read it, did he like it? I rather doubt he would have. He didn't like sex scenes in books. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have at least a tolerance for them as she read many books with sex scenes. Sometimes, when she thought a writer said foolish things about sex, she'd say something about it. She never commented on Rabbit, Run and I made no attempt to hide that I was reading it.
I suspect he didn't read it. It wasn't his kind of thing, too WASPy. He preferred stories of adventure and exploration and I follow him in that.
Patricia Lockwood has written a piece on John Updike. I found it via Marginal Revolution where the link is labelled "Anti-Updike". The review itself is kind of vague. You get a sense that Lockwood has problems with Updike but can't quite find words to adequately describe it but keeps trying.
(I'm guessing, perhaps incorrectly, that Lockwood has managed to thwart the rules and write her own Wikipedia entry. Then again, perhaps a devoted fan who has completely internalized Lockwood's style wrote it. In any case. it has the same lyrical feeling—long on feeling, short of facts or logic—that the review has. Part of me admires her for pulling this trick off.)
In any case, the sense I get is that women of Lockwood's generation have mixed feelings about Updike. They seem to loathe him and yet they also seem to read an awful lot of his stuff. Is he a convenient bête noire for them? I suspect so. I get the same feeling reading Lockwood on Updike that I get hearing people complain about relatives whom they, nevertheless, keep visiting.
I sometimes wonder which one of my parents read John Updike. I know that one of them did because there was a copy of Rabbit, Run in one of the bookcases in our house. I picked it up in Grade 8 and didn't read it. I tried, driven by a blurb that promised that the writing about sex was especially good. As it turned out, the sex writing was what put me off. I had zero experience at the time and yet I was firmly convinced that this was bogus sex.
I know that John Updike must have actually had sex at some point in his lives but his attempts at describing it in Rabbit, Run are ludicrously off and so are the various bits I've seen quoted in reviews. If a guy started talking about sex the way Updike writes about it, I'd assume the man was a virgin.
Then again, maybe he wrote about sex the way members of his generation experienced it. Perhaps sex was such a fantastically transgressive act for those who grew up before the sexual revolution that the ridiculous writing Updike did about it was the only way to capture something of the feeling? Wittgenstein impishly suggested at one point that if you think we can't describe the smell of coffee because we lack the words you should try making up new words and see if that works any better. That implicit warning would have been lost on Updike as he plunged ahead and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote about sex. And the result was apparently highly readable for my parents' generation and completely unreadable for me. David Foster Wallace's attack on Updike struck lots of other people as unfair and unbalance but I thought it perfect.
Which brings back the question of which of my parents read him. By the time I reached adolescence, my father, like a lot of men, read non-fiction. He may have still been reading fiction when Rabbit, Run was first published, the year I was one and four years before David Foster Wallace was born. The copy in our house was a paperback and it may have come out a year or two after the initial publication. In any case, it may have been a time when my father was still reading fiction. If he did read it, did he like it? I rather doubt he would have. He didn't like sex scenes in books. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have at least a tolerance for them as she read many books with sex scenes. Sometimes, when she thought a writer said foolish things about sex, she'd say something about it. She never commented on Rabbit, Run and I made no attempt to hide that I was reading it.
I suspect he didn't read it. It wasn't his kind of thing, too WASPy. He preferred stories of adventure and exploration and I follow him in that.
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