James Wolcott on John Updike

Portrait of John Updike by David Levine

A special shout-out to James Wolcott for his brilliant, witty, perceptive “What you can get away with” in the February 19 London Review of Books. It’s a review of John Updike: A Life in Letters. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s a reconsideration of Updike’s life and work. Wolcott says, “Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him.” 

Reading that, I found myself getting annoyed. Updike is one of my heroes. He hasn’t fallen out of fashion or favour with me. But as Wolcott proceeds with his review, it becomes clear that he, too, is an admirer, subject to certain caveats. Of the letters, he says, 

It’s easy to peck and paw at the letters, that’s what these cockspurs are for, but there’s no belying the tremendous heft of this selection, amounting to an authoritative autobiography supplemented with photographs, chronology and an index that doesn’t skimp. It’s all here, Updike in full, and almost none of it has gone stale. An unbroken arc from boyhood to infirmity, the gravity’s rainbow of a life, career and mind.

Wolcott is excellent on Updike’s relationship with The New Yorker. He says, “The longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out’ – and ripened into one of the most inspiring matings of man and magazine in the annals of troubadour song.”

He says further, “Updike went on to become one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, his sentences nimble, airy and balletically turned out, his observational acuity on a whole other optical level, as if Eustace Tilley’s trademark monocle had conferred X-ray vision.”

The one aspect of Updike’s work that Wolcott deplores is his misogyny. He says, 

The reason Updike has fallen out of favour is more resistant to remedy. His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. 

Yes, I remember that Lockwood piece. What a bloodbath! Wolcott’s review provides a more positive, congenial view of Updike. Highly recommended. 

Postscript: See also Wolcott’s superb “Caretaker/Pallbearer” (London Review of Books, January 1, 2009), a review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick. Wolcott says that Updike’s eye and mind are “the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear.” This piece contains one of Wolcott’s most inspired lines: “America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.”   

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #3 "Barry Levinson's 'Diner': Kael vs. Wolcott"

This is the eighth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Barry Levinson’s Diner: Kael vs. Wolcott” (January 18, 2014):

It’s interesting to compare James Wolcott’s “French Fries and Sympathy” (in his recent collection Critical Mass) with Pauline Kael’s “Comedians” (in her classic 1984 collection Taking It All In). Both are reviews of Barry Levinson’s charming, offbeat 1982 autobiographical movie Diner. They provide an excellent opportunity to contrast Kael’s and Wolcott’s critical approaches. Also, I want to see how the student stacks up against the master. Wolcott was a Kael disciple, a Paulette. They saw Diner together. Wolcott writes about it in his memoir Lucking Out (“ ‘What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?’ she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. ‘Gravy.’ ‘They put gravy on French fries?’ ‘Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is an option’ ”). Wolcott was just a fledgling; Kael was at the height of her powers. The comparison may be unfair to Wolcott. On the other hand, he may surprise us. He’s an inspired metaphorist. And he’s closer to Diner’s culture than Kael is; he grew up near Baltimore, where Diner is set.

Both pieces are appreciative. Kael, in her “Comedians,” calls Diner “a wonderful movie,” “that rare autobiographical movie that is made by someone who knows how to get the texture right.” Wolcott, in his “French Fries and Sympathy,” describes the film as a “bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until the squeak of dawn.”

Wolcott’s piece starts strong. His first paragraph contains this marvelous line:

As Baltimore pretties itself with crinkly gold Christmas decorations and rows of navy-blue Colt banners, Levinson’s characters – Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Billy (Timothy Daly), and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) – scheme and gamble, cop cheap feels and mull over impending marriages, blow warmth into their knotted fists, reminisce about high school escapades, razz each other into fits of helpless laughter.

That “blow warmth into their knotted fists” is very fine.

In contrast, Kael’s loveliest effect is her conclusion:

Levinson has a great feel for promise. At the diner, the boys are all storytellers, and they take off from each other; their conversations are almost all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. The diner is like a comedy club where the performers and the customers feed each other lines – they’re all stars and all part of the audience. The diner is where they go to give their nightly performances, and the actors all get a chance to be comedians.

Both critics admire Diner’s talented young cast. Both are excited by Mickey Rourke’s Boogie. Kael calls Boogie “the sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group.” Wolcott describes him as a “tattered prince of sleaze.” Wolcott’s depiction of Kevin Bacon’s eyes as a “bleary, amused scrunch” is very good, as is Kael’s notation of Steve Guttenberg’s “perfectly inflected Paul Newman-like grins.”

Both critics are superb noticers. In his piece, Wolcott points out that the drummer in the strip-joint scene is “portrayed by Jay Dee Daugherty , formerly the drummer for Patti Smith.” In “Comedians,” Kael notes “the kid wandering around quoting from Sweet Smell of Success.” Regarding the wedding scene, Kael mentions “the Baltimore Colts marching song and the bridesmaids’ dresses in the Colts’ colors (blue and white), and Beth trying to teach her record-aficionado husband to dance.” Looking at the same scene, Wolcott observes,

Here girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet, Earl affably picks his way through the buffet, Boogie and the gang gather around the table (ties loosened, smiles relaxed); the entire sequence has a hushed tenderness in which every character is given his dignified due and then suspended in time, to be remembered only with fondness.

That phrase, “girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet,” is wonderfully alive. At the end of his piece, Wolcott says that Diner’s “world and feelings have the full crack of life.” So, too, do these two splendid, generous-hearted reviews.

Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": Wolcott v. Malcolm

Susan Sontag (Photo by Richard Avedon)

Two recent contrasting views of Susan Sontag’s powerful 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in Sontag's great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn):

1. James Wolcott, in his “All That Gab” (London Review of Books, October 24, 2019), a review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life, says, 

“Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag’s dismantling of the cult, canonisation and revisionist whitewashing of Leni Riefenstahl, struck like lightning when it first appeared in the New York Review with its bravura last sentence – ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone.

2. Janet Malcolm, in her “The Unholy Practice” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019), also a review of Moser’s book, refers to 

Sontag’s thrillingly good essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in The New York Review of Books in 1975 and reprinted in the book Under the Sign of Saturn, in which she justly destroyed Leni Riefenstahl’s newly restored reputation, showing her to be a Nazi sympathizer in every bone.

I agree with Malcolm. Sontag’s essay isn’t just good; it’s thrillingly good. It’s riveting. It deconstructs Riefenstahl’s book of splendid colour photographs and shows it for what it really is – not a lament for a vanishing tribe (its ostensible subject), but a continuation of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic.

Here’s a sample:

The introduction, which gives a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s pilgrimage to the Sudan (inspired, we are told, by reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa “one sleepless night in the mid-1950s”), laconically identifies the photographer as “something of a mythical figure as a film-maker before the war, half-forgotten by a nation which chose to wipe from its memory an era of its history.” Who but Riefenstahl herself could have thought up this fable about what is mistily referred to as “a nation” which for some unnamed reason “chose” to perform the deplorable act of cowardice of forgetting “an era”—tactfully left unspecified—“of its history”? Presumably, at least some readers will be startled by this coy allusion to Germany and to the Third Reich.

If you relish painstaking analysis, passionate argument, and vigorous writing, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism.” It’s one of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read.  

Chiasson On Wolcott: Five Poison Darts

Dan Chiasson and James Wolcott are two of my favorite critics. They differ from each other in many ways. Chiasson is a Mandarin, an incredibly close reader, a cerebral Helen Vendler-style lyrical analyst, who writes mainly about poetry. Wolcott is a hard-bopping Vernacularist who shoots from the hip and lets it rip the way Pauline Kael did. He roams across the cultural field covering comedy, TV, books, music, and movies. But in one significant way, Chiasson and Wolcott are very similar – both are inspired conjurors of figuration. Here, for example, is Chiasson on Frank O’Hara: “His poems lacked the formal appliqué of rhyme and meter, and, where most poets deposited words with an eye dropper, O’Hara sprayed them through a fire hose.” And here’s Wolcott on John Updike: “Yes, as always, there are beautiful sentences here, metaphors and images that have the soft, preening splendor of flowers photographed by Irving Penn. But these are flowers scattered across brackish water.”

Recently, in his “ ‘The Absurdity of Straight Men’ ” (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014), Chiasson reviews Wolcott’s essay collection Critical Mass. In it, he has some kind words for Wolcott (“He is the preeminent critic of contemporary spectacle”; “He writes equally well of Philip Larkin and Telly Savalas, Bob Dylan and Designing Women”). But he also fires some acid-tipped darts at him:

1. Finding “a paucity of women” in Wolcott’s book, Chiasson implies that Wolcott prefers men as critical subjects because “women are harder to ironize, a tougher target”;

2. He calls Wolcott “a pure example of the critic as master and superior: always smarter, subtler, and more refined, as well as saner, more disabused, and morally evolved than the poignant wights he captures in his prose”;

3. He says Wolcott’s choice of subjects are “sitting ducks”;

4. He deplores Wolcott’s “attack on Woody Allen’s ‘Modern Library’ culture canon,” calling it “the lowest moment in this book”;

5. He says “there are better things to do with one’s three score years and ten than write about Chevy Chase’s horrible talk show, or the bloopers on Conan O’Brien, or the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

It seems to me that all these criticisms badly miss their mark. Firstly, Chiasson is wrong about there being “a paucity of women” in Critical Mass. The book contains nine pieces on females, including Vanessa Redgrave, Patti Smith, Doris Day, Joyce Carol Oates, Edie Sedgewick, Ayn Rand, and Anaïs Nin. In addition, many of his movie and TV reviews include descriptions/assessments of actresses’ performances. And while Chiasson may find that “women are harder to ironize, a tougher target,” Wolcott obviously doesn’t. See, for example, his brilliant demolition of Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance (“As comedy, this scene is about as imaginative and subtle as a whoopee cushion slipped under the circus fat lady, but what makes it truly disagreeable is Oates’s shameless zeal – her willingness to do anything to tart up her book, even turn a writer as great as Twain into a pornographic buffoon”).

Secondly, far from being “master and superior” – “always smarter, subtler, and more refined, as well as saner, more disabused, and morally evolved than the poignant wights he captures in his prose” – Wolcott gives praise where praise is due, setting aside the imperfections of the subject’s life, and focusing on the merits of his or her work. For example, regarding John Cheever, when he says, “Now we come to the inevitable station stop in the piece where we say, But enough about the Life, with all its gauche lapses and unkempt complications – what about the Work? The Work holds. The Work withstands,” I want to cheer. How tonic Wolcott’s words are compared to, say, Colm Tóibín’s, who appears to relish calling Cheever a “drunk” and a “snob” (see “My God, the Suburbs,” London Review of Books, November 5, 2009). Wolcott approaches Mailer and Capote in the same generous way, according them the benefit of the doubt. Of Mailer he says, “But heedlessness was what helped propel this human cannonball into the highs of The Armies of the Night and the other daredevil triumphs as well as the belly flops into the sawdust where he wildly, erratically overshot.” I don’t detect the superior attitude that Chiasson speaks of. Yes, Wolcott can puncture and deflate. There’s nothing wrong with that. Pretension, condescension, prejudice – these are worthy targets. We need critics like Wolcott who can wittily mock them. Chiasson mistakes Wolcott’s irreverence in the face of pompousness and phoniness for superiority. It’s a serious mistake.

Thirdly, the assertion that Wolcott chooses ‘sitting ducks” for subjects is a low blow. It makes it sound as if his subjects are easy pickings. Updike’s essays, Hemingway’s letters, Larkin’s poetry, Hitchcock’s movies, Woody Allen’s movies – these are rich, complex, subtle works well worth Wolcott’s or anyone’s consideration.

Fourthly, Chiasson is wrong when he says Wolcott “attacks” Woody Allen’s “ ‘Modern Library’ culture canon (the Marx Brothers, Godard, Kafka, Mozart, James Joyce).” It’s not an attack. He’s merely pointing out that “Allen is preaching the Marx Brothers to audiences clued in to the Farrelly Brothers. Allen’s heavy intentions don’t fly in this period of lighter gravity” (“How Green Was My Woody”).

Fifthly, Chiasson’s assertion that “there are better things to do with one’s three score years and ten than write about Chevy Chase’s horrible talk show, or the bloopers on Conan O’Brien, or the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson” trivializes cultural criticism. Chiasson spends his time analyzing, among other things, the tenses of Frank O’Hara and the narrative forms of Louise Glück. Some people (not me) might consider that a waste of time. If writing about Chevy Chase, Conan O’Brien, Doris Day, and Rock Hudson helped Wolcott generate some of those “hundreds, maybe thousands, of the most consistently surprising sentences any American critic has written” (Chiasson’s words), his time was well spent. Cranky Chiasson, with his de haut en bas “there are better things to do,” is the one who’s being “superior.”

Notes on James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

James Wolcott, in his delectable essay collection Critical Mass, describes John Updike’s Hugging the Shore as being “crammed with goodies.” The same can be said of Critical Mass. One of its most enjoyable aspects is Wolcott’s Kaelesque ability to pin his subjects with arresting, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued appraisals. For example, he says Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “conveys the champagne fizz and sparkle of fashion magazines in the fifties, the infusion of frisky new energy into old money. It’s all surface, but the surface dances.” He calls Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” “a cutthroat string quartet.” He says of William Shawn, “His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle.” Of Norman Mailer: “The crippler is that in his writing Mailer was psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing – a Playboy Bunny mansion of haughty bitches and breathy ditzes whose dialogue bore no resemblance to indoor speech.” On William Styron: “My own problem with Styron’s ennobled potboilers was not his subject matter, point of view, historical accuracy, pale-male effrontery, or any other heavy carbs, but the sheer awful self-conscious succulence of the prose, a fruit-orchard in every scene-painting description.”

Wolcott doesn’t analyze at the level of language the way James Wood does. His hands aren’t as inky with text (to steal a phrase from Wood) as Wood’s are. Both critics are incredible metaphoricists. Wolcott mixes his metaphors more than Wood does. His writing is fizzier, more audacious. In his piece on Marvin Mudrick, Wolcott says that Mudrick “turned litcrit into a spinoff of stand-up comedy.” The same can be said of Wolcott. Like Kael, he’s a master of the parenthetical wisecrack. His inspired “Ved, have a melon ball,” in “The Love Bug,” makes me laugh every time I read it.

Reading Wolcott, I’m sometimes reminded of Wilfrid Sheed, except he doesn’t treat criticism as a game the way Sheed did. Sheed’s reviews were all about how witty he could be. Wolcott is more attentive to his subject, more descriptive. When he’s really digging his material, he can strike some wonderfully surprising, surreal word combos. Consider this beauty from Wolcott’s superb “Manny Farber’s Termite Art” (included in Critical Mass):  

His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder’s blobby corpus that what’s left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla.

When was the last time you saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Hershey’s chocolate,” “R. W. Fassbinder,” “blobby corpus,” “toilets,” “telephone cord,” “empty bed,” “giant beer bottle,” “magazine spread,” and “Hanna Schygulla” conjoined in the same sentence? I’ll bet, never. It’s the prose equivalent of a ravishing Rauschenberg combine. I love it.

Wolcott doesn’t treat Capote and Cheever as failed saints the way (say) Daniel Mendelsohn and Colm Tóibín do. “Liar,” “failure,” “snob,” “drunk” occur so often in Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show” (included in his How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008) and Tóibín’s “My God, the Suburbs” (London Review of Books, November 5, 2009), I found myself thinking, these guys enjoy using these words. It’s tonic to read Wolcott’s Capote and Cheever pieces because he avoids Mendelsohn’s and Tóibín’s moralizing, prosecutorial approach. Wolcott relishes Capote’s and Cheevers’s complex, tormented personalities. He says of Capote:

For many, the fizzle of Answered Prayers and his personal tailspin offer a spectacle more engrossing than the arc of a distinguished life. A dignified exit may be desirable in principle, but if you can have your subject bumming around in his bathrobe in public, then you’ve got yourself a Cautionary Tale. There but for the grace of God and an empty liquor cabinet go I.

On Cheever, he writes:

Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow.

I agree. The essence of being human is that we screw up. I applaud Wolcott’s humanism (and humor). Dan and Colm, have a melon ball. 

Barry Levinson's "Diner": Kael vs. Wolcott

It’s interesting to compare James Wolcott’s “French Fries and Sympathy” (in his recent collection Critical Mass) with Pauline Kael’s “Comedians” (in her classic 1984 collection Taking It All In). Both are reviews of Barry Levinson’s charming, offbeat 1982 autobiographical movie Diner; they provide an excellent opportunity to contrast Kael’s and Wolcott’s critical approaches. Also, I want to see how the student stacks up against the master. Wolcott was a Kael disciple, a Paulette. They saw Diner together. Wolcott writes about it in his memoir Lucking Out (“ ‘What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?’ she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. ‘Gravy.’ ‘They put gravy on French fries?’ ‘Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is an option’ ”). Wolcott was just a fledgling; Kael was at the height of her powers. The comparison may be unfair to Wolcott. On the other hand, he may surprise us. He’s an inspired metaphorist. And he’s closer to Diner’s culture than Kael is; he grew up near Baltimore, where Diner is set.

Both pieces are appreciative. Kael, in her “Comedians,” calls Diner “a wonderful movie,” “that rare autobiographical movie that is made by someone who knows how to get the texture right.” Wolcott, in his “French Fries and Sympathy,” describes the film as a “bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until the squeak of dawn.”

Wolcott’s piece starts strong. His first paragraph contains this marvelous line:

As Baltimore pretties itself with crinkly gold Christmas decorations and rows of navy-blue Colt banners, Levinson’s characters – Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Billy (Timothy Daly), and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) – scheme and gamble, cop cheap feels and mull over impending marriages, blow warmth into their knotted fists, reminisce about high school escapades, razz each other into fits of helpless laughter.

That “blow warmth into their knotted fists” is very fine.

In contrast, Kael’s loveliest effect is her conclusion:

Levinson has a great feel for promise. At the diner, the boys are all storytellers, and they take off from each other; their conversations are almost all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. The diner is like a comedy club where the performers and the customers feed each other lines – they’re all stars and all part of the audience. The diner is where they go to give their nightly performances, and the actors all get a chance to be comedians.

Both critics admire Diner’s talented young cast. Both are excited by Mickey Rourke’s Boogie. Kael calls Boogie “the sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group.” Wolcott describes him as a “tattered prince of sleaze.” Wolcott’s depiction of Kevin Bacon’s eyes as a “bleary, amused scrunch” is very good, as is Kael’s notation of Steve Guttenberg’s “perfectly inflected Paul Newman-like grins.”

Both critics are superb noticers. In his piece, Wolcott points out that the drummer in the strip-joint scene is “portrayed by Jay Dee Daugherty , formerly the drummer for Patti Smith.” In “Comedians,” Kael notes “the kid wandering around quoting from Sweet Smell of Success.” Regarding the wedding scene, Kael mentions “the Baltimore Colts marching song and the bridesmaids’ dresses in the Colts’ colors (blue and white), and Beth trying to teach her record-aficionado husband to dance.” Looking at the same scene, Wolcott observes,

Here girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet, Earl affably picks his way through the buffet, Boogie and the gang gather around the table (ties loosened, smiles relaxed); the entire sequence has a hushed tenderness in which every character is given his dignified due and then suspended in time, to be remembered only with fondness.

That phrase, “girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet,” is wonderfully alive. At the end of his piece, Wolcott says that Diner’s “world and feelings have the full crack of life.” So, too, do these two splendid, generous-hearted reviews. 

James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

I’m pleased to see that New York Times’ critic Dwight Garner has named James Wolcott’s Critical Mass as one of his ten favorite books of 2013. Garner says, “Mr. Wolcott’s cultural criticism is ecstatic and alive, and this big box of his best stuff is absurdly entertaining — a rolling series of intellectual lightning strikes” (“Dwight Garner’s 10 Favorite Books of 2013,” nytimes.com, December 19, 2013). I agree. Critical Mass is a tremendous source of reading pleasure. I’ve been gobbling it up like a chocolate truffle fiend who’s just been given a basket of Godiva’s finest. I started with one of the richest bonbons in the collection – “Caretaker/Pallbearer,” an incendiary, riotous review (part hand grenade, part hurrah, to borrow from Critical Mass’s subtitle) of John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick, which I first read in the London Review of Books (January 1, 2009) and have never forgotten. How could you forget a piece that ends “America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden stab of sperm”? God, I love that line – surreal, startling, delightful, all at once. Here’s another inspired passage from the same review:

To stay on her toes, Sukie goes down on her knees. That’s how things are done in the fallen world of geriatric erotica. No Updike novel seems quite complete without a fancy cumshot, as they say in the porn trade, the artistic blowjob in Seek My Face earning a runner-up citation in the 2003 Bad Sex Awards (‘his pale semen inside her mouth, displayed on her arched tongue like a little Tachiste masterpiece’), and his larger body of work garnering him a Lifetime Achievement Award this year. The BJ performed here is a bit less refined than Seek My Face’s nimble juggling feat, but luminous as only an Updike emission can be: ‘Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea.’ A sloppy facial set to the ‘rhythmic relentless shushing’ of the sea – it may not be the stuff of Gershwin romance, but it’ll do until creaky infirmity takes even Sukie out of commission, round about the year 2016.

Luminous as only an Updike emission can be – how marvelously fine that is! Updike was still alive (for another twenty-six days) when “Caretaker/Pallbearer” appeared. I’ll bet he read it and lapped it up. Quoting and analyzing those BJ descriptions is exactly what he’d do if The Widows of Eastwick was written by someone else and he was reviewing it.

I’m still feasting on Critical Mass. It contains, among other choice items, eight New Yorker pieces. I’ll post a more extensive review of it later. For now, I just want to voice my agreement with Dwight Garner and say that Critical Mass is one of my favorite books of 2013, too.