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July 31, 2006

WE FIGURED PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS A DIY TITLE ...

The Times Online tries to understand why, in the face of consistently poor reviews, John Updike's Terrorist is flying off the bookshelves.

All of which makes me so angry that I interrupt Ian McEwan’s hiking holiday in France. He is halfway through Terrorist and, like me, loving every word. I mention the critics and he sighs. “Perhaps,” he suggests, “they’re all just weary of a writer who can produce three or four brilliant, quotable lines on every page.”

In other words, Updike is just too good for them. They can’t stand being constantly exposed to somebody who just writes so well. This is, in fact, a minor tradition of modern American letters. Norman Podhoretz — an intellectual grandee: you can tell by his horrible fat-man-on-tiptoes prose — once remarked: “I have been puzzled by many things in the course of my career as a literary critic, and one of them is the high reputation of John Updike.” Ooh, get him. And Gore Vidal described Updike as being “fixed in facility”, as clear a case of the revenge of mediocrity on genius as I have ever heard.

Okay, okay, I’ll calm down. Terrorist is not Updike’s best novel, but then neither is Macbeth Shakespeare’s best play. Or, to put it another way, Updike’s worst — and Terrorist is definitely not that — is way, way better than almost everybody else’s best. He is a very great novelist indeed and, I suspect, the greatest writer of English prose alive. In 100 years, people will look back on those critics with dismay and derision. “He is,” says McEwan, in-between hikes, “a great master of the fine print of existence, the corners of human pleasures and sadness. And he has a frightening level of detachment.”

Posted at 12:11 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Steve Mitchelmore

Thanks for drawing my attention to this. I've responded at length at my blog.

Posted by: Steve Mitchelmore | July 31, 2006 at 03:01 PM

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