Amis v. Wood

Martin Amis, in his “Bellow: Avoiding the Void,” included in his superb new essay collection The Rub of Time, compliments New Yorker book reviewer, James Wood, calling him “one of Bellow’s most well-attuned critics.” Both writers admire Bellow immensely. Amis says, “Bellow is sui generis and Promethean, a thief of the gods’ fire: he is something like a super-charged plagiarist of Creation.” Wood, in his “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” (The Irresponsible Self, 2005), writes, “Saul Bellow is probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century–where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical.”

But there are at least two writers Amis and Wood disagree on – Nabokov and Updike. Amis loves their work; Wood, not so much. Of Nabokov, Amis writes, “I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius” (“Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell”; included in The Rub of Time). In “John Updike’s Farewell Notes” (also in The Rub of Time), Amis calls Updike “perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov.” 

Wood’s view differs. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye.” Of Nabokov, he says: “Bellow notices superbly; but Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself” (How Fiction Works). He’s even more critical of Updike. In John Updike’s Complacent God” (The Broken Estate, 1999), he says, “Updike is not, I think, a great writer; and the lacuna is not in the quality of the prose but in the risk of the thought.”

Are these criticisms valid? Do Nabokov and Updike “freeze detail into a cult of itself”? Do they “exaggerate the noticing eye”? Is Updike too serene? Amis doesn’t address these points. He faults some of Nabokov’s and Updike’s late work. In “Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell,” he calls Nabokov’s Ada “a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.” In “John Updike’s Farewell Notes,” he says of Updike’s My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, “Updike’s prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass.” But, overall, he passionately embraces their writing. Here, for example, is his assessment of Nabokov’s Letters to Véra:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy. [“Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra,” The Rub of Time]

That “unresting responsiveness” is inspired – a powerful counterclaim to Wood’s provocative charges.