October 7, 2013 Issue

Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her absorbing “The Bookof Laughter,” in this week’s issue, says, “Updike was a painter of words.” She likens him to Matisse (“Updike would be Matisse: the color, the sensuality”). Reading this, I thought, Yes, Matisse, and maybe a touch of Cézanne. Elizabeth Tallent, in her brilliant Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike’s Erotic Heroes (1982), commenting on Updike’s Couples, writes, “That Cézanne-like tactic of grappling after ‘shade and shape,’ characteristic of The Centaur, the Olinger Stories, and Rabbit Run is less in evidence here, although it never quite vanishes altogether.” This stems from an observation that Updike himself made in his brief, wonderful essay “Accuracy” (Picked-Up Pieces, 1976): “Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence toward what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs.”