Volume 48, Number 3 · February 22, 2001
Rabbit Undone
By Paul Berman
Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel
by John Updike
Knopf, 359 pp., $25.00
The meaning of John Updike's new title, Licks of Love, becomes clear only when you glance at the dust jacket, where a round-bottomed banjo with a long skinny neck leans like a jaunty exclamation mark upward across the cover. A 'lick,' in the kind of music that might be played on a banjo, is something short and rhythmic, without any of the cumulative elaborations of a straight-out melody. A lick, in music as in love, may be savory, but it is small. And as you plunge into Updike's Licks of Love, the title does seem well chosen. The book contains a dozen short stories, and some of those stories ('The Women Who Got Away,' 'Lunch Hour,' 'My Father on the Verge of Disgrace,' 'Oliver's Evolution') are so slight and cursory as to seem more like anecdotes than stories—licks, not melodies.
Review, 3760 words
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