Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #8: John Updike's "Gaiety in the Galleries"

A great book review consists of three main ingredients: description, analysis, and quotation. Of these three, quotation is the most crucial. John Updike, master writer and preeminent New Yorker book reviewer for over forty-five years, was a great quoter. His reviews are like little anthologies. They give us literary sensations in concentrated form. Updike not only quoted from the book under review; if he judged the book deficient, he’d cite a successful example along similar lines, and provide a sample quotation from it for comparison. For example, in his brilliant review of Peter Gay’s Art and Act (“Gaiety in the Galleries,” The New Yorker, February 21, 1977; collected in Updike’s superb 1983 Hugging the Shore), a study of causation in art history, he finds Gay less than satisfactory on the question of why Manet’s painting is historic. To exemplify a more illuminating analysis of Manet’s work, Updike quotes the following passage from André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence:

Manet’s contribution, not superior but radically different, is the green of The Balcony, the pink patch of the wrap in Olympia, the touch of red behind the black bodice in the small Bar des Folies-Bergère…. [They] are obviously color-patches signifying nothing except color. Here the picture, whose background had been hitherto a recession, becomes a surface, and this surface becomes not merely an end itself but the pictures raison d’être. Delacroix’s sketches, even the boldest, never went beyond dramatizations; Manet (in some of his canvases) treats the world as – uniquely – the stuff of pictures.

Updike comments:

Malraux’s point about the patches of color offers a perspective, a thread through the tangle; he performs a historian’s task by locating the historic moment. Manet in 1881, painting a bar girl at the Folies-Bergère, dabs in some red without a representational excuse; Gropius in 1911, designing a shoe-last factory, leaves out a corner support and joins two planes of glass at a right angle; Mondrian around 1914 (it is characteristic of artistic events to be chronologically elusive) covers a canvas with no more than vertical and horizontal lines – such are the “acts” that Mr. Gay promises to distinguish in his title, and that he all but loses within the infinite multiplicity and interrelatedness of historical circumstance.

Malraux’s observation on Manet, when I read it thirty-three years ago in Updike’s review, built itself into my perception. To this day, whenever I see a reproduction of a Manet, I think of what Malraux said about the color-patches. And whenever I think about the historian's task or, for that matter, the critic's task, I think of Updike's astute comment on Malraux's point about the color-patches - how it "offers a perspective, a thread through the tangle."

For Updike, quotation was the artistic aspect of reviewing. As he said in the foreword to Hugging the Shore, “To show, in a series of quotations, the author himself (dead or not) what he has indeed written: this does approach creativity.”

In recognition of the quotational brilliance of Updike’s “Gaiety in the Galleries,” I’m pleased to award it #8 place on my “Top Ten." It's the first of two reviews by John Updike that I've selected for inclusion on the list.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.