Thursday, August 20, 2009

Updike - Reviewed

Did you have a chance to read Julian Barnes's recent essay on Updike? I loved it. (And this from a guy who's fairly ambivalent when it comes to Updike...)

"Updike's world often appears a superficially stable place, of mainly white, mainly middle-class suburbia, of houses and families and children and golf and drinking and, of course, adultery—that most conventional way to rise above the conventional, in Nabokov's phrase. But just as Hemingway, the supposed hymner of masculine courage, writes best about cowardice, so Updike, delineator of conventional, continuing America, is incessantly writing about flight."

No comments:

Post a Comment