Jack Kerouac's Typewriter
Another Kerouac Typewriter
Sylvia Plath's Typewriter
Cormac McCarthy's Typewriter
John Updike's Typewriter
George Orwell Tickling the Keys
Ernest Hemingway's Typewriter
How To Write
April 14, 2010
John Updike’s Rules for Reviewing Books
From Picked-up Pieces (1975):
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
January 3, 2010
The Anxiety of Influence
In her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted,” published in today’s New York Times, Katie Roiphe suggests that “we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels.” By the Great Male Novelists she is, of course, referring to Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. She continues: “Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.” Roiphe picks a relatively slim sample of “young male writers” to prove her thesis, including David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Franzen. Slim sample, but still, quite representative. Her big claim: “The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex.” Hmmm . . . Perhaps. Makes us think about how writers like Dennis Cooper, Wells Tower, Junot Díaz, or Stephen Elliott might fit into this scheme . . .
January 27, 2009
John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Bites The Big One
John Updike died this morning. He was pretty old (76) and sick (lung cancer). Is it callous to say I’m not a fan? Perhaps. Anyway.
His death brought to mind the words of a great American writer who died less than a year ago, David Foster Wallace, who, in reviewing Updike’s 1997 novel Toward the End of Time, made a pretty solid case against Updike’s ungenerous solipsism. Wallace starts with a line from Mailer’s 1969 poem “Midpoint” — “Of nothing but me … I sing, lacking another song,” (I assure you, gentle reader, Updike’s song of himself is hardly as inclusionary, loving, or democratic as Whitman’s) and continues:
Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60′s and 70′s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.
Although Wallace cops to being “probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans,” his treatment of Toward the End of Time is pretty scathing, and I think he makes a pretty good (implicit) case for why the fictions of the “Great Male Narcissists” will probably be ultimately considered mere period pieces, and not stand the test of time. But it seems like I’m speaking ill of the dead.
Wallace was a great writer and his young death still pains me. Read his full assessment of Updike’s novel here. It’s funny.
Said