Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
Sentimental Education
By John Banville
Villages
by John Updike
Knopf, 321 pp., $25.00
Facility in art, or the appearance of facility, is nearly always suspect. Trollope lost many readers when he disclosed in an autobiography how easily he wrote his novels. Jack Yeats had to conceal from his clients and critics the speed with which he could dash off a painting. Even Vladimir Nabokov forfeited something of his reputation for literary fastidiousness when in the afterglow of the lavish success of Lolita a series of reissues and new translations of his earlier, Russian, novels—one a year for years, so it seemed—revealed a level of pre-Lolita diligence and productivity that Humbert Humbert would probably have disdained. For some, the ideal is Joyce—ten years on Ulysses, seventeen on Finnegans Wake—or the great but costive Philip Larkin, who in a long poetic career published only four slim volumes of verse.
Review, 3140 words
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