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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.― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 3, 2019
Yeah, I used to find his takes useful in The New Yorker, and now I'm looking into
Hugging The Shore: Essays and Criticism, winner of the 1983 National Book Award, as the cover points out. Quite a range of interests and subjects. Just now took my first gondolier through Pinter's unproduced Proust screenplay, with the now ex-narrator one character, most often terse, deadpan, in brief scenes, with imagery detached from sense of voice: could work; the reviewer can't be sure of course, but some of it invites appealing speculation, other parts not so much. It makes him think again about the novel, traces of it resurfacing---
Followed by his acute responses to
Doris Day: My Own Story, by A. E. Hochtner. "Orchestrated" from tapes, with a very strong sense of voice.
Damn, I may have to read this whole thing.
― dow, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 17:44 (one year ago) link
Lord Alfred: The last paragraph of "The Brown Chest" kills me every time. For all my crankitude about JHU, that "Family, family without end" passage is crystalline and pretty much perfect.
Bastard.
― blissfully unawarewolf (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, 25 October 2022 17:52 (one year ago) link
Yes! I am casting my memory back to The Afterlife, and another interesting story in that collection is "Aperto, Chiuso." It's a pretty thorny bit of misogyny that is paradoxically revealing.
The woman is being portrayed as irrational and hysterical. The guy is presenting himself as decent and well-intentioned and perplexed by her irrationality. But then on second thought, he's the viewpoint character so he's obviously sculpting the narrative; if you read it through 21st-century eyes you can see that he's actually being kind of a dick. Not sure if that's how Updike saw it but that's my current reading.
― blissfully unawarewolf (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, 25 October 2022 18:07 (one year ago) link
That's good that the story lets you do that: a strong. always pertinent POV, suitable for different interpretations.
xp first gondolier first gondola, I meant! Proustian Slip, but also I was trying to suppress reference to Updike as my thoughtful gondolier on this maiden voyage through his review, because too corny even for me.
― dow, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 18:12 (one year ago) link
But even or especially with Pinter's crisp, startling reduction, there's a sense of gliding conveyed by Updike's impressions of his reading and thinking experience.
― dow, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 18:17 (one year ago) link
I read RABBIT, RUN, and greatly admired its style, and was surprised and maybe even disturbed by its drama.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 21:01 (one year ago) link