Activity

a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming

I was attracted to my mistaken idea of mathematics, my naïve notions of certainty and absolutes, the hermetic world created by a language that seems to have little or not ambiguity.

declivities and a half dozen crosshatched secrets.

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.