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January 29, 2009

JOSEPH O'NEILL ON UPDIKE

Of the many tributes to John Updike pouring forth, we especially commend Joseph O'Neill's brief Granta essay to your attention.

The example of Updike is intimidating to the writer in the matter of sentences, in the matter of output, in the matter of aptitude – until, that is, one remembers that Updike himself was a stranger to intimidation, and that the Updike precedent ultimately authorizes, indeed obligates, the writer to give the task at hand his or her best shot. Like every novelist, I’ve been asked to comment on my ‘influences’, and invariably I have given a suitably wary, watery response. Nobody likes to talk about personal plumbing. But, in the interests of clarifying what it can mean to owe a literary debt, and in order to make plain the nature of the credit Updike in particular offers his fellow, lesser practitioners, here’s a confession.

To find out what he's talking about, go here.

Posted at 11:41 AM in Obit |

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Comments

Anne

Thanks for this, Mark. It's lovely--I skimmed it (must. do. my. work.) and will return to it. I am surprised at how saddened I am by his death.

Posted by: Anne | January 29, 2009 at 01:38 PM

John Freeman

Hey Mark -- Glad you liked the piece. It's a tough week, isn't it? I, like many others I suppose, took for granted we'd have those three pages a day to count upon for much longer.

Posted by: John Freeman | January 30, 2009 at 08:33 AM

Rick

Hey Mark--I heard Jonathan Lethem and O'Neill talk about Updike (and their Grants essays) last week. The conversation is available on my blog for listening.

Posted by: Rick | February 02, 2009 at 09:10 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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