Volume 33, Number 19 · December 4, 1986
Mr. Updike's Planet
By Frederick C. Crews
Roger's Version
by John Updike
Knopf, 329 pp., $17.95
With the possible exception of his friend Norman Mailer, no living American writer has been more closely watched than John Updike. After eleven novels and thirty books, however, our most prolific and various man of letters remains curiously out of focus and resistant to consensus. According to Joseph Epstein among others, Updike lacks anything much to say and is thus habitually thrown back on 'overwriting and sex, and overwriting about sex'; he 'simply cannot pass up any opportunity to tap dance in prose' (Epstein, pp. 56, 55). [*] That is the Updike for whom, according to Gilbert Sorrentino, reality appears 'a poor drab thing that awaits his gilding' (Macnaughten, p. 78). But on the other side we find a formidable array of critics, most of them English professors, who consider Updike a powerful social chronicler, a master of physical texture and psychological nuance, a profound moralist, a symbolist, a Christian philosopher, in short a living classic whose accession to the Nobel podium is already overdue. Who is kidding whom?
Review, 5949 words
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