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.”   

In Praise of Rebecca Clarke's Portraits

Rebecca Clarke, Patricia Lockwood

A shoutout to Rebecca Clarke for her wonderful color portraits of writers that now and again appear in The New York Times Book Review. There’s one of Patricia Lockwood in last week’s issue: see above. I collect these portraits. Here are two of my favorites:

Rebecca Clarke, Brenda Wineapple

Rebecca Clarke, Joy Williams

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.” 

On One

Patricia Lockwood, in her “Arrayed in Shining Scales,” in the current London Review of Books, writes,

The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

What does “on one” mean? Is it a misprint? Maybe not. Google provides this definition: “Acting crazy, stirring the pot, causing trouble, being a menace in any capacity.” Does that describe Malcolm in The Silent Woman? I don’t think so.

If you ask me, Lockwood is the one who's on one. Her "Arrayed in Shining Scales" is as wild and strange as its subject (the life and work of Sylvia Plath). I devoured it. 

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). 

Patricia Lockwood's Brilliant "Isn't that ... female?"

Patricia Lockwood (Photo by Thomas Slack)

The best book review of the year (so far) is Patricia Lockwood’s “Isn’t that ... female?” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2024). It’s an appraisal of A. S. Byatt’s recently reissued Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories. Actually, it’s an appraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre. Lockwood loves Byatt. She writes,

I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too. 

What I savor are Lockwood’s ingenious descriptions – surreal montages of incredibly vivid, concentrated imagery inspired by Byatt’s works. For example:

The cover of the original edition of Medusa’s Ankles – hell, the title, let’s be honest – illustrates the aesthetic problem. An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

And:

My affinity is perhaps unexpected. I know the books so well that looking at them on the shelf is like reading them. What she created for me, in the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet Raphael Faber, ever withdrawing his tapered fingertips, dry as his own spice cakes. Out on the moors is Jacqueline, with thick sandwiches, observing her population of Cepea nemoralis. Carrying dishes to the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from “an excess of exact imagination,” exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.

And this extraordinary summary of Margaret Drabble:

The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer Bird-Cage, devouring, immoral, greedy as golden syrup, drunk on the morning of her wedding, in a wild silk dress and a dirty bra, telling her sister she would love her forever if she made her some Nescafé.

No other critic writes like this. James Wood creates wonderful collages of exquisite quotation. This one, for example, from his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005), a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

But this is different from Lockwood’s fever dreams of condensed imagery. Here’s one more from her Byatt piece:

Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number of glazes. But colour was one of Byatt’s strongest points, such that you can feel different schemes in every book. The greens of Possession – vegetable, mineral and moss when we are in Brittany – and the burnishing panther of the fairy tales, gold-purple-black, stalking through. The buttery sunlight and gouache of Still Life. Reading her at seventeen I had an idea that perhaps the English had a better sense of colour because they spent so much time looking at teacups; I must be highly disadvantaged in this regard. Coffee cups have Garfield on them – or, if you’re unlucky, Odie. They do not fill your mind with the soft dreaming tints that made up Byatt’s encyclopedia. She has to mention it every time; it is more than an attribute, it is an achievement, a soul. The eggs of things are being lifted up out of their Easter dye, and don’t you exclaim every time? What a surprise! Look at that one!

Those last three sentences are inspired. The whole piece is inspired – criticism as passionate creation. 

On Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (Photo by Carl Mydans)

Recent essays on Vladimir Nabokov by Ian Frazier (“Rereading Lolita,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2020) and Patricia Lockwood (“Eat butterflies with me,” London Review of Books, November 5, 2020) spurred me to consider my own view of Nabokov’s work. I’m not a fan of his novels – too many puns, puzzles, and chess moves. But two of his nonfiction pieces have influenced me tremendously: “Colette” (chapter 7 of his brilliant autobiography Speak, Memory, 1966) and “Inspiration” (included in his 1973 Strong Opinions, a collection of interviews and articles). 

“Colette” originally appeared in The New Yorker, July 31, 1948. It’s a wonderful recounting of a 1909 trip that young Nabokov and his family took from St. Petersburg to Paris on the Nord-Express, and then from Paris to Biarritz on the Sud-Express. It begins unforgettably:

In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details. Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of the compartments, the beds had been made. 

This superb passage enacts the “delicate verisimilitude” of the object it describes. In detail after marvelous detail, the memory of a model sleeping car seen long ago is fondly evoked. I love the way the details – the blue upholstery, the embossed leather, the polished panels, the inset mirrors, the tulip-shaped reading lamps – steadily accrue. Nabokov lavishes his attention on it. It’s a thrilling act of description – the first of many in this exquisite story. 

My other favorite Nabokov piece, “Inspiration,” defines a seldom mentioned, but essential literary ingredient: “One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification.” The first phase is the “prefatory glow” (“This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation”). The second stage is the “forefeeling” of what the writer is going to tell:

The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words.

“A shimmer of exact details” - how fine that is.

Nabokov not only defines inspiration, he provides examples of it in other writers’ work. He says,

From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage – or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.

One of the stories he lists is John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (The New Yorker, November 20, 1954). The passage he chooses is “Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.” Cheever’s sentence is sublime. Would I have noticed it on my own? Probably not. Nabokov’s selection of it helped shape my own idea of what constitutes an inspired sentence. I’ve never forgotten it. 

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike

John Updike (Photo by Brigette Lacombe)

I’ve just finished reading Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). What an extraordinary review! John Updike’s work has been panned before, but never to this extreme. Lockwood savages 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 analyses 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.

My response to Lockwood’s piece is shock. Updike is my hero. He’s one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list, and you’ll open sixty-two posts that either discuss or quote his work. But here’s the rub: I’m allergic to fiction. The Updike I love isn’t the novelist and short story writer; the Updike I love is the author of Assorted Prose, Picked-Up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, Due Considerations, Higher Gossip, Just Looking, Still Looking, and Always Looking – collections of essays and reviews that, for me, are touchstones. Lockwood doesn’t consider any of these works. (Hugging the Shore is on her short list of Updike “delights.”) Her focus is on Updike’s fiction, particularly his four early novels – The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Run, The Centaur, and Of the Farm – and on the other Rabbit novels. 

Does her criticism of Updike’s novels apply to his critical writings? No, I don’t think so. Lockwood herself describes his criticism as “not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of other human beings, even to see into the minds of women.” 

One of Lockwood’s main contentions is that, after the early novels, there was a serious falling off in the quality of Updike’s fiction. She says, “Either way, some absolute angel lifts and moves on in the late 1960s.” I don’t think that applies to Updike’s criticism. The pieces in his posthumous collections Higher Gossip (2011) and Always Looking (2012) are every bit as strong and brilliant and delightful as the pieces in his first collection, Assorted Prose (1965).

If I were defending Updike’s fiction against Lockwood’s charges, I think I’d start with an observation Martin Amis makes in his recent The Rub of Time:

But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov – who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.