tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post6592389901039747446..comments2024-03-27T18:24:19.683-07:00Comments on Steve Sailer: iSteve: John Updike is deadUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-13699398905709092142009-01-30T00:51:00.000-08:002009-01-30T00:51:00.000-08:00John Updike's passing is sad news indeed... he pos...John Updike's passing is sad news indeed... he possessed a truly beautiful mind; he didn't just write well, he wrote wiselyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-71800817803051893512009-01-28T07:16:00.000-08:002009-01-28T07:16:00.000-08:00Updike wrote about people like myself. And, he wro...Updike wrote about people like myself. And, he wrote about technicians. I kept waiting for him to write a novel featuring American military men; a totally uncovered genre. Of course he probably did not have much military in his family; but surely neighbors, and he had to do research for "The Coup".<BR/><BR/>And need I say that on almost every page I have to pause and catch my breath at the realism and beauty and clear-eyed vision of the world.RobertHumehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03913525250329418444noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-70836131868120037122009-01-28T00:02:00.000-08:002009-01-28T00:02:00.000-08:00Some fellow writer once dismissed Updike's innate ...Some fellow writer once dismissed Updike's innate conservatism as "the only federal program he believes in is the Post Office." And recently Erica Jong decried the sorry lack of major talents in American literature to an Italian magazine. Her <A HREF="http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=jong+%22men+of+the+right%22&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8" REL="nofollow">first complaint</A> was that Updike and Tom Wolfe were "men of the right". Well, at least she implied they have talent...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-7914594394680229502009-01-27T21:37:00.000-08:002009-01-27T21:37:00.000-08:00James: Fair question. I was probably unclear, and ...James: Fair question. I was probably unclear, and referring to the critics' explicit correlation of Updike's characters' individual flaws to their ethnicity, which is to say that many critics used the WASPiness of Updike's characters to tar WASPs as a whole. It's hard to find an upper-caste lit review from the 1980's on that doesn't somehow (subtly or not) insult WASP culture by guilt through association with his characters. (And I notice this as a non-WASP.) Whereas critics have been reflexively trained not to see the characters of writers of other ethnicities, be they Jewish, black, Asian, etc as representative of an entire ethnic group. Anyway, on the day of JU's passing, all this seems trivial: he was such a worldly, informed and humane writer, with such a marvelously precise microscope trained on the "American character," that I feel certain his books will long outlast most of his contemporaries'. I'm also confident that long after Pynchon is a pomo footnote interesting only to grad students, stories like "A&P" (eternally anthologized in high school collections) will instill and inspire a love of literature in the public's mind.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-29409557329827651822009-01-27T19:51:00.000-08:002009-01-27T19:51:00.000-08:00Anonymous: I don't think Steve's use of the defini...Anonymous: I don't think Steve's use of the definite article necessarily meant that he regards Updike as "THE great American novelist." A shorter version would be "The novelist is dead." That doesn't mean he was the only novelist.<BR/>Dollmaker: Don't reviewers frequently talk about the Jewishness of Roth's characters?James Kabalahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02335302113772004687noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-36868188394357107102009-01-27T19:07:00.000-08:002009-01-27T19:07:00.000-08:00"The great American novelist has died at 76."Steve..."The great American novelist has died at 76."<BR/><BR/>Steve, do you really believe Updike deserves that title over Twain?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-36705590656722425732009-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:002009-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:00Dollmaker is right. I'm not a big fan of any of h...Dollmaker is right. I'm not a big fan of any of his novels in particular, but his exquisite style put him far ahead of any of his contemporaries.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-3370530296047337382009-01-27T16:42:00.000-08:002009-01-27T16:42:00.000-08:00I'll go to my grave swearing up and down that Updi...I'll go to my grave swearing up and down that Updike was the best American fiction writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was technically better than the overrated Pynchon, more humane and judicious than Bellow, Roth and Mailer, and more flexible than his old nemesis Vidal (whose strength is in his essays). Updike's short stories are generally considered to be better than most of his novels, and they're probably the best place to start. Nevertheless, The Centaur remains my personal favorite novel and one of the few that can move me to tears. Updike wrote about the people in the small towns that once filled this country between the coasts; liberal critics liked to conflate his characters' flaws with their WASPiness (can you imagine mainstream reviewers mentioning in every discussion of Roth's characters how Jewish they are?) but Updike didn't write as an ethnic writer, but an American one, capturing the vices and virtues of the Protestants who were once the majority here and built us from the ground up. Because he wasn't openly liberal--he was fairly conservative on a lot of issues--he was a target for feminists and other assorted peanuts who hated the fact that a Living White Male could just be so damn good yet humble at the same time. I'm lucky to have met him briefly and can attest to his generosity and humility as an individual, despite having several Pulitzers under his belt. To use a cliche he himself never would have used, we're not going to see his like again.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9430835.post-47776634859120335052009-01-27T13:22:00.000-08:002009-01-27T13:22:00.000-08:00I'm very sorry Updike is dead. Sure, it happens to...I'm very sorry Updike is dead. Sure, it happens to the best. But I can't help thinking that the old pro had more good swing left in him, and that the rise of Obama would have been just the motivation he needed.<BR/><BR/>He will be missed.<BR/><BR/>Now I'm going to order THE COUP from the library.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06559830693993775055noreply@blogger.com