John Updike has died of lung cancer. He was 76, and I was a fan. But I was also a fan of DFW, and this seems as good a time as any to point to Wallace’s blistering review of Updike’s 1997 novel Toward the End of Time.
The review was published in the New York Observer (and later in Consider the Lobster.) Here’s a taste:
Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.
I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans. Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do think that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent—I’ve continued to read Mr. Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.
Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason—mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:
“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”
“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”
“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.”
These are actual—trust me—quotations, and I’ve heard even worse ones, and they’re all usually accompanied by the sort of facial expression where you can tell there’s not going to be any profit in arguing or talking about the aesthetic pleasure of Mr. Updike’s prose. None of the other famous phallocrats of his generation—not Mailer, not Frederick Exley or Charles Bukowski or even the Samuel Delany of Hogg—excites such violent dislike. There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this dislike—jealousy, iconoclasm, P.C. backlash, and the fact that many of our parents revere Mr. Updike and it’s easy to revile what your parents revere. But I think the major reason so many of my generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G.M.N.’s has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters….
