I had read about him through Baradwaj and then completely forgot the chain and lost him! Have you lost anyone or any thought this way and never been able to trace it back?
As if by divine intervention, almost 6 - 8 months after losing him, I find him again!
I still found it difficult to read the reviews of John Updike, but I am saving him here, for posterity!
http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/bitty-ruminations-71/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9272409/Higher-Gossip-Essays-and-Criticism-by-John-Updike-review.html
http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/always-looking-by-john-updike.html?_r=0
The last piece has some wonderful information on Updike's style of writing.
But novelists and poets bring along, to the gallery or museum, a particular set of skills. Having a gift for narrative and an eye for the revelatory incident, novelists excel at swiftly but comprehensibly guiding us through the high points of an artist’s life.
Obsessed with detail, poets and novelists notice what is transpiring everywhere in a painting, and how each brush stroke furthers the illusion that we are seeing a hand or a pearl necklace. Most important, novelists and poets have had practice using language to describe not only how something looks but the experience of seeing it.
Often, Updike’s descriptions of paintings do one of the most important things that art writing can accomplish, which is to persuade the reader to seek out, or take another look at, a painting or sculpture.
“Always Looking” (edited by Christopher Carduff) has passages of great charm, several of which occur when Updike is describing the atmosphere of a museum show. He captures the wry humor of seeing Gilbert Stuart’s portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The next, sixth room is the heart of the show, and the reason so many parents brought their children. Fourteen portraits of the Father of Our Country in one great custard-yellow room — a herd? a flock? a bevy? of George Washingtons! Such a concentration has its comedy as well as a surreal grandeur. The image is so familiar as to leave an art reviewer wordless. Even the chirping children were momentarily hushed.” A very different atmosphere surrounds the Richard Serra sculptures installed at the Museum of Modern Art and mobbed with happy families enjoying “the biggest interactive art event in Manhattan since Christo’s saffron flags fluttered in a wintry Central Park over two years ago.”
The fact that John Updike’s essays engage the reader enough to agree or argue with them is a testament to how vivid they are. Reading “Always Looking,” we are grateful for the pleasure of having Updike’s eloquent voice continue to tell us what he saw, and what he knew and thought about art.
Also, I learnt more about Updike on Wiki.
The amount of work he's produced in mind boggling. How can someone write, read, review so much?
Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity."[2] His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans;
He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."
His mother's attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. He later recalled how his mother's writing inspired him as a child. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in."
Updike also underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith.
He wrote about Impressions of his day-to-day life in Ipswich.
Updike’s memoir indicates that he stayed in his “corner of New England to give its domestic news” with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer.
Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America, and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores. He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me."
He once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.
He described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated." He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes.
The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.[4] Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader."[4] On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life."
After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.[53] 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society,[54] a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works." The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that ( in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/12/on-john-updike/?pagination=false)
Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and describing it, concluded:
Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size"
Jonathan Raban, said:
It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract."
Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing
Literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'"
Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books - demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language.
Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
One thing that touched me most was, his rules for literary review.
In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
Updike delivering the 2008 Jefferson Lecture.
As if by divine intervention, almost 6 - 8 months after losing him, I find him again!
I still found it difficult to read the reviews of John Updike, but I am saving him here, for posterity!
http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/bitty-ruminations-71/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9272409/Higher-Gossip-Essays-and-Criticism-by-John-Updike-review.html
http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/always-looking-by-john-updike.html?_r=0
The last piece has some wonderful information on Updike's style of writing.
But novelists and poets bring along, to the gallery or museum, a particular set of skills. Having a gift for narrative and an eye for the revelatory incident, novelists excel at swiftly but comprehensibly guiding us through the high points of an artist’s life.
Obsessed with detail, poets and novelists notice what is transpiring everywhere in a painting, and how each brush stroke furthers the illusion that we are seeing a hand or a pearl necklace. Most important, novelists and poets have had practice using language to describe not only how something looks but the experience of seeing it.
Often, Updike’s descriptions of paintings do one of the most important things that art writing can accomplish, which is to persuade the reader to seek out, or take another look at, a painting or sculpture.
“Always Looking” (edited by Christopher Carduff) has passages of great charm, several of which occur when Updike is describing the atmosphere of a museum show. He captures the wry humor of seeing Gilbert Stuart’s portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The next, sixth room is the heart of the show, and the reason so many parents brought their children. Fourteen portraits of the Father of Our Country in one great custard-yellow room — a herd? a flock? a bevy? of George Washingtons! Such a concentration has its comedy as well as a surreal grandeur. The image is so familiar as to leave an art reviewer wordless. Even the chirping children were momentarily hushed.” A very different atmosphere surrounds the Richard Serra sculptures installed at the Museum of Modern Art and mobbed with happy families enjoying “the biggest interactive art event in Manhattan since Christo’s saffron flags fluttered in a wintry Central Park over two years ago.”
The fact that John Updike’s essays engage the reader enough to agree or argue with them is a testament to how vivid they are. Reading “Always Looking,” we are grateful for the pleasure of having Updike’s eloquent voice continue to tell us what he saw, and what he knew and thought about art.
Also, I learnt more about Updike on Wiki.
The amount of work he's produced in mind boggling. How can someone write, read, review so much?
Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity."[2] His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans;
He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."
His mother's attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. He later recalled how his mother's writing inspired him as a child. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in."
Updike also underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith.
He wrote about Impressions of his day-to-day life in Ipswich.
Updike’s memoir indicates that he stayed in his “corner of New England to give its domestic news” with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer.
Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America, and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores. He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me."
He once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.
He described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated." He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes.
The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.[4] Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader."[4] On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life."
After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.[53] 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society,[54] a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works." The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that ( in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/12/on-john-updike/?pagination=false)
Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and describing it, concluded:
Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size"
Jonathan Raban, said:
It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract."
Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing
Literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'"
Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books - demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language.
Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
- And another regrettable thing about death
- is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...
One thing that touched me most was, his rules for literary review.
In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
- 1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- 2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- 3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
- 4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
- 5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
- To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
No comments:
Post a Comment