In any case, Wood in his punitive Protestant iconoclasm would of course disparage Updike, since the novelist, as Louis Menand explains, belongs to the Joycean tradition of sacramental poetics from which Beckett was in flight: As James Wood wrote in The Broken Estate, “Updike, unlike Beckett or Bernhard, never appears to doubt that words can be made to signify, can be made to refer, to mean.” I admire Beckett and Bernhard, but I wonder what they would think of how their astringency has been made into a fashion statement by the Anglo-American literati. This facility has also been held against him. Updike, he said, was an American Shakespeare he could write about anybody and anything in any genre. A bias toward contrarianism-or perhaps metacontrarianism-makes me skeptical of the cool-kid consensus against the prodigious man of letters that has extended at least from David Foster Wallace’s overcompensatory try-hard male-feminist routine to Jessa Crispin’s exasperated middle-school “ugh.”Ī decade ago, a distant acquaintance urged me, over the noise of a crowded bar in Central Pennsylvania, to read Updike after I had unthinkingly repeated the cool-kid cliches. I will confess to wanting to like John Updike.
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