though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women

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

The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years.

Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

“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

contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane

a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks

Homiletically speaking, the only difference between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists is that the latter’s got a bigger choir.

And this isn’t just because of clunky prose or luxated structure.

when one of the Twelve Monkeys interrupts to ask whether it’d be fair to characterize this new ad as Negative, Murphy gives him a styptic look and spells “r-e-s-p-o-n-s-e” out very slowly