The first time John Updike met the late Norman Mailer was in 1964, after a literary function in New York intended to ease Cold-War tensions by bringing together Soviet and American writers.
"[Mailer] came up to me on the street," Mr. Updike told The Observer in a phone interview Sunday. "It was kind of Read More
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, 703 pages, $40
New to New York and still a teenager, I used to play a kind of sidewalk parlor game with a friend on our dawdling way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a jokey test of one-upmanship in Read More
The first of many erotic insertions (this particular act was illegal in several states until just last year) occurs on page six. Just a page and a half later comes the first of many existential pangs, this one provoked by a diorama at the Museum of Natural History:
“The wolves running in the night were Read More
This collection of 20 recent essays by Cynthia Ozick begins with a memorial appreciation of Susan Sontag. It’s noble and notable that Ms. Ozick should appreciate Sontag, a vanquishing rival for literary reputation and, equally to the point, a liberal emanating from the old Partisan Review, while Ms. Ozick stands with the Commentary crowd who Read More
A delicious tension animates the best passages of Terrorist, a tug of war between the severe faith of a devout Muslim teenager, who sees everything in black-and-white dichotomies (straight/crooked, clean/unclean, faithful/infidel), and the lush, various, subtly shaded prose of John Updike, who can’t resist a gorgeous sentence. The greedy eye of the novelist grabs at Read More
Everyman, the late-15th-century morality play, teaches a grim lesson. Summoned by Death to “take a long journey,” Everyman finds that his friends and family quickly desert him, that riches are worthless, that even his best qualities won’t protect him:
O all thing faileth save God alone—
Beauty, Strength, and Discretion.
For when Death bloweth Read More
“I have a theory that your true psychological—even, in the deepest sense, metaphysical—age is the age you mostly are in your dreams,” said Cynthia Ozick, 77, in a fluttering voice as girlish and diffident as a college co-ed’s. She was speaking by phone from her home in New Rochelle, which she shares with her husband, Read More
Consider the Books Editor. Pulled in different directions by aesthetic judgments, commercial considerations and petty practicalities, this particular B.E., by nature idealistic (he’s not in it for the money, that’s for sure), is worn down by weekly compromise until at last he begins to dread the publication of any book that calls for a serious Read More
On Sunday night, at the dead center of the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral cavity, the performance artist Marina Abramovi c re-enacted a Joseph Beuys performance from 1965 called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Honey was used to adhere gold leaf to her face; it fluttered like flame at the back of her head. Read More
What does John Updike know about art, anyway? Enough to write about it perceptively. The renowned novelist’s art criticism appears in The New York Review of Books and has been collected in a newly published book. But he doesn’t know enough—or, perhaps it is better said, see enough—to re-imagine its historical and aesthetic contours. Read More
