And this isn’t just because of clunky prose or luxated structure.
The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years.
today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself
though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women
“In the Penal Colony” conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grâce is a spike through the forehead
