Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom.
Authors John Updike
W Earl Snyder
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…I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.
Martin Amis
John Updike
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It’s nice to think of Updike’s idealized reader. But except for the early stories, I don’t think it’s a young boy in a small Midwestern town who’s reading Updike […] I think Updike is writing for the audience that John Cheever said he was writing for, “intelligent, adult men and women,” wherever they live.
Raymond Carver
John Updike’s opinions on others
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Edith Wharton might be brusque and aloof in person—with a mouth, an unkind observer said, “shaped like a savings box”—but she was a writer of unstinting empathy.
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Her published novels began sharp, terse, angular, and blithely enigmatic, on the French model of Queneau, and she ended as one of the most expansive and leisurely expositors since the Victorians.
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The novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon. […] Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.
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Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence
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…the rich killer Harry Thaw stripping naked and banging his penis between the bars of his cell at the Tombs while Houdini watches, radical Emma Goldman relieving scandalous Evelyn Nesbit of her corset and giving her a loving oil massage. It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game.
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The novel’s bloody illustrations of the horrors of war compel assent and pity, and yet, such is the novel reader’s romantic nature, it is the lovers that keep us turning the page; theirs is the consummation we devoutly wish. Our wish is granted, but with a duplicitous art.
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An nagging sense of gimmickry, amid all these spinning wheels of plot, accompanies our awed and often delighted awareness of Atwood’s mastery of period detail […] as this dwindling family floats down the twentieth century’s dark river.
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Ellen Olenska is one of the splendid women of American fiction—alluring, conflicted, vulnerable, blithely and touchingly truthful—and we see her entirely through his eyes, in a few hurried encounters; she speaks a sibylline modicum of words in the course of the novel.
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In Tanizaki, the bizarre reaches out to possess reality; perverse sexual obsession is just his most usual instrument for demonstrating how precariously society’s facades and structures contain the underlying honne.
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While still an Oxford undergraduate, he had repeatedly played Russian roulette, in search of a permanent holiday from the world. The world gets a grim report in his fiction. For Pinkie in Brighton Rock, “the world never moved: it lay there always, the ravaged and disputed territory between two eternities.”
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Witty observation and artful phrasing are the rule in Calvino’s subtly arranged sets and subsets of vignettes.
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant deepens into the tragedy of closeness, of familial limitations that work upon us like Greek fates and condemn us to surrender and secret fury.
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His universe is claustrophobically human, and his ambition and reputation alike remain in thrall to the weary concept of the “comic novel”.
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He’s a supreme study of the writer as public figure and the hazards thereof.
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Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us…
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The novel’s Olympian ease and its catholic acceptance of horror and splendor as they arise in this our “paradise of misery” could not have been achieved in the United States, and no European novel would contain its joyous emptiness…
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I think he’s interesting, but more interesting as an operator within a cultural scene than as a—oh, as a singer to my spirit. A quaint phrase that possibly betrays me.
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As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life.
Edith Wharton
Iris Murdoch
The March
E. L. Doctorow
Ragtime
Atonement
The Blind Assassin
The Age of Innocence
A Cat, A Man, and Two Women
Brighton Rock
Mr Palomar
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Kingsley Amis
Ernest Hemingway
Italo Calvino
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Donald Barthelme
Franny and Zooey
The Witches of Eastwick