John Updike

had to read this sentence abt 5 times in one of the pieces in self-consciousness (which is v good btw)

I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irratiated with light from the opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.

!!

Hope he cracked a window.

that's precisely what I dislike about Updike: the precision with which it's overwritten.

lol turnoff

lol privilege embedded even at the grammatical level

but mainly lol turnoff

My problem is less with the writing and more just that he writes about doing kind of gross things in a self-congratulatory tone

well i mean it's updike. that is the writing

xp otm

actually I also hate "patiently masturbating" and also the fact that it's ski pants.

i hate brotherly pride. . . ew!!!!!

haha oh yeah that too. Really the whole thing is about as unsexy as it could be.

Google has "comradely pride"

Google has been known to be wrong

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

The 60's man

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

hes an asshole, thats his thing. i read "rabbit run" again last year. still enjoyed it and i love his style. i dont think the book condones his actions if anything it points out his delusions (and his immaturity).

So does Amazon

?

lol classic xp

maybe it's changed to comradely in later editions - i verbatim copied it out of the copy of the book i have - hardcover, tho sez First Trade Edition 1989 hm

not that it makes me like it, but "comradely" is much better than "brotherly" there and adds a lot of meaning to the passage -- it implies conspiracy and secret revolt rather than incest

The 60's man

― waterface, Wednesday, July 24, 2013 3:05 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm btw. the very next sentence (which tbf is a new paragraph), he talks abt smoking pot and wearing dashikis. the essay is abt him being the least liberal/dove-ish of his circle of peers

can a lil bit hear his voice saying 'do you take advantage of the new freedoms?'

That single sentence really is quintessential Updike. Vermeer with ski-pants and a hard-on.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/john-updike-life-in-fiction-adam-begley.html

http://i57.tinypic.com/v4xuoh.jpg

Hanging wit U

70s swinger look new england division. also is that a bust of the author over the door? the shades made me think of andy warhol

Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged. You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.

bury me in this lede https://t.co/YGsHFb3nlr pic.twitter.com/GWBw5zQ9fU

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) October 2, 2019

It's a great piece.

My day has been saved

It's so good. I guess I'm going to have to get over the creepy-sounding title of her book, because I want to read more like that.

(the whole lrb piece, not just the lede)

i hadn't known about the foster wallace-mary karr thing she obliquely refers to o_O

When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. Janice is a grotesquerie with a watery drink in one hand and a face full of television static; her emotional needs are presented as a gaping, hungry and above all unseemly hole, surrounded by well-described hair. He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday. In the scene where Janice drunkenly drowns the baby, it wasn’t the character I felt pity for but Updike, fumbling so clumsily to get inside her that in the end it’s his hands that get slippery, drop the baby.

ftr I admire Updike's criticism: thanks to him, I discovered Henry Green and Muriel spark, among others. And he was generous toward Cheever. But I could never finish his fiction, not once. The facility, the complacency of the descriptions -- it had a lulling effect. He and Cheever get bound together, but Cheever was fuckin' weird.

Her book, Priestdaddy, is great.

Best revive ever

apart from her lrb pieces, has she been doing criticism elsewhere, because its much better than her other writing. I have her most recent book of poems and it was v disappointing. haven't read priestdaddy though.

her piece on lucia berlin was good but i haven't read any lucia berlin

Lucia Berlin is good. Believe the hype.

^^^^^

Priestdaddy is very much in the voice of her review work

well written crit def, i still like updike idk i think hes true to himself/honest in a misogynist & outdated way

maybe someone should make a lockwood thread

that was a fantastic piece, yeah. especially loved this: "he grows up, in short, but not into a real adult, just into a country club member."

It’s almost as if she absorbed his novelistic style and used it against him and absorbed his critical style as well and used it to restore the balance, to give some semblance of fairness.

Which is awesome

I myself used could never pull off such a feat, I used way too many “ands” in that sentence, just to name one thing.