James Wolcott reviewed John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick earlier in the year, and I'd not had a chance, until tonight, to read his essay. Wolcott, who edits at Vanity Fair, is a funny guy, and his review of Updike is spot-on. One section of the review, in particular, struck me:
"Updike may have been praised for his missionary work on behalf of the Sexual Revolution...but the generation that followed were the children of divorce - the collateral damage of those adulterous games of musical beds."
This, argues Wolcott, is one of the main reasons that authors like Foster Wallace labeled Updike - and to a lesser extent, Roth - G.M.N.s (Great Male Narcissists). The argument is an interesting one.
As I say, I enjoyed Wolcott's review of the (rather drab) fiction of John Updike.
Updike should stay at home
As the child of divorced parents who went to school in the late 1940s and the 1950s with children who were similarly lumbered (not all, of course), I can tell Mr. Wolcott that “children of divorce” did not first come about when Messrs Roth and Updike took up the pen. Nor did the “adulterous games of musical beds” first start being played when they decided to celebrate them. If that is what they did, which is highly debatable. Indeed, the first “Great Male Narcissist” probably trod this world when the first caveman bopped the first cavewoman on the head for the purposes of sex, and lo how his kind has prospered, down to Roth’s and Updike’s day and beyond. If recent generations have been the generations of divorce, it is because the stigma of divorce has waned in recent decades, not because humankind has become more adulterous. Of course, one could try to argue that by writing about sex and adultery more openly, that somehow encourages divorce. One could also try to argue that by writing about the horror and butchery of war, that encourages war. Neither terribly successfully, but one could try.
ReplyDeleteAll reasonable, all correct. I enjoyed your post, Roger. --Jesse
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