The Elegant Variation: MONEY SHOT

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January 13, 2009

MONEY SHOT

James Wolcott's outstanding (and hilarious) review of the latest Updike is as superb an example of Snark as Art as we've seen. Enjoy it. Especially the closing line. Heaven knows, we did.

John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty. ‘The New Yorker and John Updike are both deeply immersed in the image of man as trivia,’ Alfred Chester wrote when panning Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. ‘Reading Updike, like reading the New Yorker, gives one the impression that the pages would turn to ash at the mere suggestion that life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and the American plenty. He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather. Apparent lack of inner struggle and purring efficiency made it possible to take him for granted. ‘No one has ever sat around worrying about Updike, the way one apparently worried about Wolfe and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as if they were all soloing the Atlantic with each book, to see whether he’s lost his touch or his nerve or his fastball,’ Wilfrid Sheed wrote in Essays in Disguise. ‘We know damn well he’ll have his touch this time and next: we just want to see whether we like what he’s done with it.’

The book, incidentally, sounds dreadful.

Posted at 10:43 AM in Critics & Criticism | Permalink

Comments

I did enjoy it, guiltily - as if I was clapping at a playground beating.

Perhaps if I'd read the book, I'd be happily yelling 'Kill, kill! Go for his eyes, Wozza!'

Posted by: Damon Young | January 14, 2009 at 12:01 AM

I see The London Review of Books sells copies of the books it reviews, through a link on the page of the review. Times must be changing.

Posted by: Stephan | January 14, 2009 at 09:09 AM

Whoops! I think you missed some paragraphs of the review: "Updike is in his native element, his eye and mind the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear. Abroad, Updike is still only a glorified sightseer, a Keen Observer, but in his native land he blends the roles of novelist, historian, social critic, civics teacher, randy theologian, anthropologist, dermatologist, photorealist illuminator of drugstore aisle and automobile showroom (every shiny accent in place), and caretaker/pallbearer of the New Yorker tradition of scrupulous observation salted with a proper measure of irony, acerbity, dismay and regret, depending on the circumstance or site under inspection... It’s quite an observatory Updike houses in his brain, his characters sometimes appearing as small and blank as the human figures positioned around an architectural model or a railroad set. It’s interesting – almost inspiring, really – how entertaining The Widows of Eastwick manages to be once its plot mechanisms get into motion..." But anyway, take that, John Updike! That'll learn you to keep writing books when you're old.

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | January 14, 2009 at 11:31 AM

"Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers" -- what does that even mean?

And, I suppose, this as well: "a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum"

Posted by: J.I. | January 14, 2009 at 11:56 AM

Actually, I'd put that under the category of damning with faint praise -- Wolcott can be far, far more bruising. And the line about making it possible to "take [Updike] for granted" has to be considered an appreciation.

If you want snark, see Matt Taibbi on Tom Friedman. (Or is he just going for the kill?) In any case, wow. Hope I never get on Taibbi's bad side.

http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html

Posted by: Kit Stolz | January 20, 2009 at 01:21 PM

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

January 13, 2009

MONEY SHOT

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

January 13, 2009

MONEY SHOT

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Post a comment

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism