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.”   

September 1 & 8, 2025

Pick of the Issue this week is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral.” It’s a profile of writer Patricia Lockwood. I’m a fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Her “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019), an evisceration of John Updike, is one of my all-time favorite reviews, not because I enjoy seeing Updike shredded, but because Lockwood’s voice in that piece is so brilliantly original and compelling. Schwartz describes Lockwood’s style superbly. She says, “Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I.’ ” She also says, in a line that made me smile, that Lockwood “writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” 

Schwartz delves into Lockwood’s personal life – her battle with Covid (“Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read”), her father (“a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest”), her “adolescent misery,” her husband (“forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother”), her Savannah apartment (“The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves”), her fascination with stones and gems ("She owns three different kinds of blowtorches"), her dosing herself with a quadruple espresso every morning before she starts writing, and so on. Do I need to know all this stuff in order to appreciate Lockwood’s writing? No. But it’s all interesting. I like the ending with Lockwood on the beach, flashing her breasts at two men flying overhead in a helicopter. 

Reading Schwartz’s absorbing piece, I thought of the theory recently espoused by the critic Merve Emre that the writer’s “I” is fiction. In “Going Viral,” Schwartz shows a writer who is, in person, every bit as wild, idiosyncratic, and complex as she is on the page. Schwartz authenticates Lockwood's “I.” 

Corrosion and Flow

A few days ago, we had to call a plumber. Our hot water tank was bulging alarmingly. It looked like it was about to burst. We called Luke, a local plumber who’d done work for us before. Luke is a great guy and a skillful plumber. He looked at the tank and recommended we get a new one. We agreed. He installed it the next day. It works perfectly. His fee was very reasonable. The episode reminded me of John Updike's short story “Plumbing” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1971), in which an old plumber “gazes fondly” at rusty pipes in the narrator’s basement, “musing upon the eternal presences of corrosion and flow.” I love that line. Updike repeats it near the end of the piece: “His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow.” 

Updike could make art out of almost any experience, including a plumbing job. In the Foreword of his The Early Stories 1953-1975 (2003), he refers to his stories as “fragments chipped from experience and rounded by imagination.” I think that’s one of the most inspired definitions of art I’ve ever read. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #2 Patricia Lockwood's "Malfunctioning Sex Robot"

This is the ninth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Patricia Lockwood’s savage “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019).

Savage? Oh yes. John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood slaughters him. Her first sentence warns of her intent:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.

It is a bloodbath. The piece is divided in seven sections. In the first section, Lockwood says,

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: DIED OF PUSSY-HOUNDING. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. 

That last sentence went straight into my personal anthology of great critical zingers. 

Section 1 also contains a striking metaphor – “Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965) light up section by section, like a countryside freshly wired for electricity” – that shines a beam throughout the piece. (Subsequent sections on Rabbit, Run and The Centaur each begin with the word “flash.”) 

In the second section, Lockwood analyzes Updike’s youth – his relationship with his mother (“She throws her voice and her atmospheres through his keyholes; it is his mother’s eye that examines his characters’ wives, to see whether they are good enough for him”), the traumatic move from Shillington to the farm in Plowville [“The solitude there verged on quarantine; the close harmonies of his four elders (his mother’s parents lived with them) repeated, turned dissonant, and set his teeth on edge; the place almost certainly made him a writer”]. 

Section 3 continues the examination of his life and then, at the mention of Rabbit Redux, turns bitingly sarcastic:

If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.

Section 4 is a wonderful capsule review of the first book of the Rabbit quartet – Rabbit, Run (“The writing sounds like the inside of an athlete’s head: clipped, staccato, strategic, as nearly empty as a high-school gym, with only himself inside it”). Lockwood says of Updike’s writing, “When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning.” Of Rabbit, Run’s female characters, she comments,

He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday.

Section 5 considers Updike’s The Centaur (“The senses move through the scenes in full galloping integration, along with the tick and weight of actual time”). Here, Lockwood conjures one of her most inspired descriptions, riffing on a line from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin: 

Winding through The Centaur is a highway that will carry us into the future: the scenery of Updike’s childhood, immensely beautiful in his eyes, penetrates the automobile, drives the car.

In section 6, Lockwood restates her argument:

After Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable – the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires – and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.

Section 7 is the ugliest part, referring to “Updike’s homophobia,” “his racism,” his “misogyny,” “his burning need to commit to print lines like ‘Horny, Jews are.’ ” But it also contains a remarkable passage – Lockwood imagining Updike reading what she’s written:

Why is it so tempting to grade him on a curve? He is so attended by the shine of a high-school star, standing in a spotlight that insists on his loveability, that presents him as a great gold cup into which forgiveness must be poured. It extended even to me: as I underlined passages and wrote ‘what the … WHAT’ next to paragraphs, I felt him sad in the clouds on my shoulder, baffled, as if he had especially been hoping that I would get it. I aimed it at you, he tells me: you were that vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The first time I read this piece, I was shocked. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open eighty-eight posts that either discuss or quote his work. But with subsequent readings, the shock wore off, replaced by a deep admiration for Lockwood’s art of evisceration.  

Credit: The above illustration is based on Thomas Slack’s photo of Patricia Lockwood (left) and Brigitte Lacombe’s photo of John Updike (right). 

March 17, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series. This week, Louisa Thomas revisits John Updike’s “Hub Fan’s Bid Kid Adieu” (October 22, 1960). It’s a wonderful celebration of this brilliant piece on Ted Williams’ last game, in which, in his last at-bat, he hits a homerun. Updike describes it:

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

I love that “It was in the books while it was still in the sky.” And I love what Thomas does with it in her piece:

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. 

Yes, exactly. Updike did what all great artists do. He caught and preserved the moment. 

September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

Lisa Borst on Nicholson Baker

I want to compliment Lisa Borst on her excellent "Ways of Seeing," in the current issue of Bookforum. It’s a review of Nicholson Baker’s new book Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Borst writes, 

Finding a Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journalism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools (longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong literary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of representation.  

“Figurative language,” “mimetic skill,” “one of the best describers alive,” “basics of representation” – these are words that immediately catch my attention. The art of description is one of my main interests. Baker’s book appears to be one that I’d enjoy enormously. Borst says of it,

Long before he turned to visual art, Baker was writing images. (There’s a generally synesthetic quality to much of his prose—blurbs on the back cover of my copy of Vox compare the novel to both Chagall’s drawings and Ravel’s Bolero—but the dominant mode, the sensory system to which he defaults, is the visual.) Baker’s exhilarating similes belong to a larger project of capturing how everyday things look in ultra-high-resolution detail; his sensibility, he admits in the early memoir U and I, is “image-hoarding.” Also in that book, in which Baker reflects on his literary indebtedness to John Updike, he refers to Updike’s image-forward style as “Prousto-Nabokovian,” one of many admiring epithets in the memoir that could equally apply to Baker himself. (I just don’t believe Baker, who in his previous book had described a woman’s pregnant belly as “Bernoullian,” and her pubic hair as “brief,” when he claims to envy Updike’s “adjectival resourcefulness.”) Nabokov’s crisp molecular comedy, his tendency toward anthimeria and dryly upcycled technical language, his cliché-demolishing descriptive precision; Proust’s luxuriant digressiveness, his great subject of time, and above all his sublime animation of psychological riffs by visual cues: already, by 1991, it was clear that these were Baker’s gifts too. 

Wow! That “cliché-demolishing descriptive precision” is superb! The whole passage is superb. Borst is on my wavelength. Nabokov and Updike are consummate describers. And she’s right; Baker is in their league (see, for example, his brilliant New Yorker pieces "A New Page" and "Painkiller Deathstreak"). His Finding a Likeness is a book I want to read. Thank you to Borst for bringing it to my attention. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "

Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"

This is the third 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 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' " (October 27, 2015):

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). 

“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” 

Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

The Art or the Life: On Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Christopher Benfey, in his recent “Buildings Come to Life,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2023), tells me something about Edward Hopper I didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t want to know. He says, “A life-long conservative Republican, he was vehemently opposed to the New Deal.” According to Benfey, he called FDR a “jackass.” I’m a fan of Hopper’s paintings. I’m also a fan of FDR. For me, the New Deal was the greatest government program of the twentieth century. It saved millions of people from the trauma of being out of work during the Great Depression. John Updike said of FDR,

Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by. [“Laissez-Faire is More,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007].

I totally agree. So where does that leave me, now that I know that Hopper, one of my favorite painters, “vehemently opposed the New Deal,” and considered FDR a “jackass”? Is it possible to continue loving his work knowing that he held such wretched anti-humanistic views? 

This raises that old vexing question – can you separate the art from the artist? Can you separate Faulkner’s racism from his Light in August? Can you separate Eliot’s anti-Semitism from his The Wasteland ? Can you separate Naipaul’s violence against his wife from his A Bend in the River? 

I don’t have the answer. I know Flaubert’s position: only the work matters; the life doesn’t. Nevertheless, once I know certain aspects of the life, I find it hard to forget them. Looking at Hopper’s wonderful Early Sunday Morning (1930), with its sunlight on the flat and ruddy brick, I find myself wondering how a guy with such a mean, narrow outlook could paint something so ravishing? Benfey, in his piece, offers a clue. He points out the absence of people in many of Hopper’s pictures. He says, “What Hopper discovered was that when people are gone, the buildings come to life.” Hopper, unlike, say, FDR, wasn’t a humanist. And this is reflected in his paintings. Maybe in this way, at least, his life and art are reconcilable. If he wasn’t the way he was, he wouldn’t have painted the way he did. Still, in light of Benfey’s revelations, I find myself looking at Hoppers slightly differently now. My love has been shaken. 

September 26, 2022 Isssue

Marius Kociejowski’s The Serpent Coiled in Naples sounds like the kind of book I might be interested in. I want to thank Claudia Roth Pierpont for bringing it to my attention. But there’s one disappointing aspect of her review. It fails to provide a sufficiently long quotation from the book that would allow me to judge the quality of Kociejowski’s writing for myself. John Updike, in the Foreword to his great Picked-Up Pieces (1976), listed five rules of book reviewing. Number two is “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” 

New Yorker book reviewers should always keep in mind that readers like me want to know not only what the book is about, but also how it’s written. James Wood knows this in his bones; he’s a generous quoter. That’s why he’s the magazine’s best reviewer. Too bad his focus is on fiction. 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Avid Particularizing

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s idea of description seems anemic. She says, 

In spite of its wide-ranging forms, our standard conception of description remains quite narrow. Derived from a realist paradigm, it is identified largely with inventories of the material world and often simply synonymous with a “prose of things.” [Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel] 

Well, all I can say is that her conception of description isn’t mine. In this series, I’ve tried to show that description is much more than just inventory. It is sensory, kinetic, analytical, detailed, immersive, and figurative. Even when it is inventory, e.g., Ian Frazier’s marvelous list of contents of the Angler’s Roost (see my previous post), it provides combinational delight. 

But I agree with Zhang on at least one crucial point: description is subjective. She says, “Description is always a form of translation rather than transcription.” She says further that “the seemingly simple, neutral task of describing is determined by a whole host of assumptions about what is worthy of attention, what is relevant and irrelevant, what the salient features are by which objects should be identified and categorized.” I think this is true. We notice and describe in accordance with who we are and what interests us. This, to me, is what makes description fascinating.

For my final example of descriptive art, I want to come full circle (so to speak). I began this series with an excerpt from John McPhee’s magnificent “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977; Book I of his great Coming into the Country). Today, I’ll finish with another passage from it – the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted earlier:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

Like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins – what an incredible image! A double simile: river like sky; salmon like zeppelins. Looking over the side of the canoe, we see their oval shapes floating there. The sentence is brilliantly visual – the perfect finish to an extraordinarily evocative paragraph.

Time to sum up. I'm struck by a phrase in John Updike’s virtuoso description of Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop that I quoted previously. Updike wrote, “But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life.” That, for me, is what description is all about: avid particularizing.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Gooseneck Lamp

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Much of description’s pleasure is in its details. Take John Updike’s description of Norman Rockwell’s great Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), for example: 

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life. (“Acts of Seeing,” More Matter, 1999)

Overrepresentation? Not in the eyes of this beholder. I relish every detail. Updike has been criticized for his “slather of detail” (see James Wood, “John Updike’s Complacent God”). But in this case, he’s in his element; he’s describing a slather of detail. Updike has found his ideal subject. Or, put it the other way around, Rockwell has found his ideal critic. Updike creates a verbal reproduction of Rockwell’s painting right down to that “little cracked mirror.” And, at the same time, he provides insight into Rockwell’s (and his own) governing aesthetic. That “avid particularizing” is inspired! 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another form of avid particularizing – lists.

June 13, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Peter Schjeldahl’s “Scaling Up,” a review of two art shows. It’s opening line made me smile: “I relish the abundance of relatively—and poignantly—dud paintings in ‘At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism,’ at the Whitney Museum.” It’s both a devastating judgment (the Whitney show is full of duds) and an aesthetic revelation (Schjeldahl has a taste for such things). What constitutes a dud? Schjeldahl tells us:

The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.

Who are the “dud” artists? Schjeldahl names them: Manierre Dawson, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, Joseph Stella, Oscar Bluemner, Ben Benn, Agnes Pelton.

Wait a minute! Elie Nadelman? I recognize that name. John Updike wrote a wonderful essay on him, “Logic Is Beautiful” (The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003; included in his 2007 essay collection Still Looking), in which he says of Nadelman’s bronze Suppliant (c. 1908-9), “How could one not love her?” But rereading this piece today, I see that Updike wasn’t a Nadelman fan. He wrote,

There is a hermetic quality to his statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layer of sealant gets thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.

So I guess Schjeldahl is right; Nadelman is a dud. But he’s an instructive dud. His featureless sculptures show the value of detail. As Updike said, “Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.”

June 28, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his disappointing “Drawing Conclusions,” in this week’s issue, reviews MoMA’s “Cézanne Drawing,” a show of some two hundred and eighty works on paper, without describing a single one of them. He admits he’s not crazy about Cézanne’s art. He says, “I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life.” He says,

You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. Each detail conveys the artist’s direct gaze at a subject but is rarely at pains to serve an integrated composition. 

Okay, fair enough, but let’s hear about those details. Schjeldahl doesn’t give us any. Instead, he uncharacteristically opts for generalizations – albeit some pretty cool ones (“Thingness magnetized him”; “Cézanne’s scattershot approach triumphed in his conflations of surface with depth”). No wonder he struggles. He’s departed from his own dictum: “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap” (Introduction to Let’s See, 2008). Or has he? In the same piece, he also says, “Nothing ruins a critic like pretending to care.” 

For a tonic antidote to Schjeldahl’s Cézanne struggles, I recommend this superb description of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) by John Updike:

Pines and Rocks, for instance, fascinated me, because its subject – these few pine trunks, these outcroppings of patchily tinted rock – was so obscurely deserving, compared with the traditional fruits of his still lifes, or Mont Sainte Victoire, or his portrait subjects and nude bathers. The ardor of Cézanne’s painting shone most clearly through this curiously quiet piece of landscape, which he might have chosen by setting his easel down almost anywhere. In this canvas, his numerous little decisions as to tone and color impart an excited shimmer to the area where the green of the pine shows against the blue of the sky, to the parts of the ochre trunks where shadow and outline intermix, and to the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass. Blue, green, and ochre – these basic shades never bore him, and are observed and captured each time as if afresh. In the intensity of the attention they receive, the painter’s subjects shed their materiality: the pines’ branches here and there leap free of the trunks, and the rocks have no heaviness, their planes all but dissolved in the rapid shift of grayish-blue tints. What did it mean, this oddly airy severity, this tremor in the face of the mundane? It meant that the world, even in such drab constituents as pines and rocks, was definitely rewarding of observation, and that simplicity was composed of many little plenitudes, or small, firm arrivals – paint pondered but then applied with a certain nervous speed. Cézanne’s extreme concentration breaks through into a feeling as carefree and unencumbered as that which surrounds us in nature itself. In its new, minimal frame, Pines and Rocks seems smaller than the canvas I remember from the Fifties – but the grandeur of its silence, the gravity with which it seems to turn away from the viewer toward some horizon of contemplation, is undiminished. [“What MoMA Done Tole Me,” Just Looking, 1989]

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

May 10, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Peripheral Proust,” in this week’s issue, says that John Updike found in Proust “the only credible modern religious novelist.” He says that for Updike, Proust was “the last Christian poet.” Is this true? Updike loved Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In one of his finest essays, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered” (included in his great 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces), Updike wrote, 

Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes – the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name – that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

That’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of writing I’ve ever read. Updike’s love of Proust was all about his style (“the dissecting delicacy of each sentence”). He says, memorably, “In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness.” Is that Christian? Maybe. Granted, Updike compared Remembrance of Things Past to the Bible, and called it “a work of consolation.” But I think it's the consolation of art, not God, that he was referring to. His love of Proust was sourced in those "tendrilous sentences." It’s the same for me. 

In Praise of the Decorative Impulse: Gopnik v. Updike

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 79 (1975)

I found Adam Gopnik’s praise of the decorative impulse, in his recent “Fluid Dynamics” (The New Yorker, April 12, 2021), refreshing. Too often abstraction is condescended to as merely decorative. Recall John Updike’s famous putdown of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 79 (1975): “Meeting a painting like this, so beautiful in its balanced tones and enigmatic nervousness, not in our reductive pages but on a suitably large wall, we accept it as ‘art,’ an expensive variety of wallpaper” (Just Looking, 1989). 

I read that many years ago and never forgot it. Is that what abstraction is – “an expensive variety of wallpaper”? Gopnik provides a tonic counter-perspective: “For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything.”

John Updike and the Meaning of "The Thing Itself"

Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin (1974)

What did John Updike mean by “the thing itself”? He uses the phrase in at least three pieces:

1. In “Journeyers” (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his 1983 collection Hugging the Shore), he said,

The literary problem faced by travel writers differs from that of fictionists and poets, whose material arrives mercifully thinned and pruned by the limitations of imagination and memory. A travel writer, notebook in hand, confronts the thing itself – immense, multiform, contradictory, numbing. 

I believe what Updike is referring to here is the raw ore of reality, unprocessed by memory or imagination – the thing itself. 

2. In “A Case of Monumentality” (originally published in the 1994 anthology Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, edited by Edward Hirsch; later included in Updike’s 1999 More Matter, and in his posthumous 2012 collection Always Looking, edited by Christopher Carduff), he wrote,

Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1975) stands in the Art Institute of Chicago’s palatial halls like a Cyclopean, ten-foot-tall security guard, his gracefully tapered legs braced apart, his spring ready to snap. But the resemblance is incidental, we feel; Oldenburg is too much the engineer and architectural draftsman to be after anything less than the Ding an sich, the thing itself. His plaster hamburgers, his canvas telephones, his giant typewriter-erasers and baseball bats and electrical switches and plugs all have an elemental solemnity that disdains anthropomorphism and beckons us into the mute, inhuman world of artifacts. Oldenburg’s sculptures look made, and concern made things.

Later, in the same piece, he said, 

The mute significance of things gives the visual arts their inexhaustible impetus; the visible world, so abundant and heedless around us, is processed by the painter’s or sculptor’s hand, and becomes understood. This act of understanding is the light that representation gives off, and that draws millions to rotate through museums, delighting in recognitions. We recognize the clothespin, even though it has been idealized in Cor-ten and stainless steel, enlarged in size, and placed upside down from the way we usually see it on the clothesline. The recognition is fringed and flavored by what art history we possess – by whatever analogies to the Eiffel Tower or Brancusi’s Kiss arise – but there is no escaping the Ding an sich. 

Here, I think, Updike uses “the thing itself” to convey the most basic, literal, unfiltered way of seeing: Oldenburg’s beautiful giant clothespin not as symbol or metaphor, but simply as itself – the thing itself.

3. In “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 collection Due Considerations), a wonderful review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, he said,

These landscapes are astonishing in their breadth and intensity; though the wall commentary and the catalogue speak of Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions, the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself, the Alpine landscapes first beheld, in their airy vastness and elevation of view, by a visitor from the Lowlands.

“The thing itself,” in this context, means reality, or as close to reality as painting can get. It means the Bruegel paintings seen not in terms of theory (“Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions”), but as revelations of the real. How I love that “the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself.” For me, it’s realism’s ultimate compliment.

Landscape and Specificity

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (1896-99)

Mark Strand, in his “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” (included in his 2000 essay collection The Weather of Words), said, “The reality of landscape has little to do with accuracy of depiction or representation.” He said that in seeing a landscape, “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with certain light or the look of a terrain.” He said that landscape painting “represents an escape from particularity.” 

Is he right? I don’t think so. The landscape paintings I admire brim with specificity. See, for example, the many inspired accuracies of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) – the shimmering areas “where the green of the pines shows against the blue of the sky,” “the parts of the ochre trunks where shadows outline and intermix,” “the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass” (I’m quoting here from John Updike’s wonderful description of Pines and Rocks in his Just Looking, 1989).

See also the exhaustive specifics of color and shape in Van Gogh’s The Plain of Auvers (1890).

Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890)

Look at what Van Gogh said about painting it:

I am totally absorbed by that immense plain covered with fields of wheat which extends beyond the hillside; it is wide as the sea, of a subtle yellow, a subtle tender green, with the subtle violet of a plowed and weeded patch and with neatly delineated green spots of potato fields in bloom. All this under a sky of delicate colors, blue and white and pink and purple. For the time being I am calm, almost too calm, thus in the proper state of mind to paint all that. [from Van Gogh’s letter to his mother, July, 1890]

Such words do not evince the sensibility of a generalist. Quite the opposite – they show an artist intent on capturing the subtlest qualities of the Auvers landscape.

One more example: Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650-51). 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51)

T. J. Clark, in his brilliant The Sight of Death (2006), says of it, “The details are exquisite and singular.” Details such as the two birches, of which Clark notes, 

Poussin has put a lot of effort separating the two birch trees and having the leaves of the right-hand one be closer to us, overlapping and partly obscuring the others, and certainly catching the light differently – catching it full on, seemingly, and reflecting more of it back. So that this tree is more a flimsy three-dimensional substance, to the other’s pure silhouette.

These are only three examples, but they’re sufficient, I submit, to cast doubt on Strand’s view. Far from escaping particularity, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Poussin immersed themselves in it.