Good piece in The London Review of Books by Patricia Lockwood. It’s called “Malfunctioning Sex Robot,” and you can read it all, here. I haven’t thought about John Updike in a good long while. But I guess if I can get over playing basketball in high school, then I can get over reading Updike. And, in both cases, I have.
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And yet, there’ll always be “Pigeon Feathers.” That one shining moment of a short story is like the kind of dream you sometimes have on waking. If it’s possible to touch the eternal and capture lightning in a bottle, that peculiarly telescopic zoom into the experience of lost innocence in adolescence, then Updike’s writing won’t have been in vain. Regardless of all the misogyny and over-precious descriptive excess that came later in his literary career. He’s definitely not deserving of the Nobel he always not-so-secretly sought, in preference to the Pulitzers he actually won. Still, as throwing shade goes, Lockwood’s “Penis With a Thesaurus” sounds kinda harsh to me.
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I think it’s telling that this reviewer describes Updike’s typical plot treatment as “a 3-panel comic strip.” After all, his first ambition – what he wanted most from even before the time of his first assignment at the New Yorker writing Talk of the Town commentary – was not to be a writer of prose, but a cartoonist. After Harvard, he actually studied at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. That’s one small detail the reviewer – with her encyclopedic treatment of Updike’s life and work – left out. No matter, though. Nobody gets it all right all the time. Updike certainly didn’t. I guess in my book, early promise beats no promise at all. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
The writer as caricature.
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Lately I’ve been reading T.C. Boyle, another gorgeous prose stylist. His latest effort is “Outside Looking In” which chronicles the early days of Tim Leary’s LSD experimentation at Harvard. It continues the series of Americana Boyle has lately been pursuing, from his treatment of Adventists hawking health food and miracle cures, to Kinsey & Co. researching modern American sex habits. Or his previous outing, The Terranauts, a quasi-historical farce set under a hermetically sealed Plexiglas bubble in the desert southwest. You can argue with his choice of material, and you can bemoan his latent misogyny and childish plotting – all traits he shares with Updike, btw. Or, you can sit back and enjoy the descriptive ride. That’s what I’m doing. If political correctness is what you seek, there’s plenty of that available – for all it’s worth. Me personally? I’ll take a stylish prose preoccupation with latter day Americana any day – warts and all.
