S by john updike7/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Such complaints were pervasive enough by the time I began reading that it was easy for me to dismiss his oeuvre entirely. Perhaps most memorably, there was novelist and essayist Anna Shapiro, who claimed that Updike’s novels left the female reader “hoping that the men in your own life weren't, secretly, seeing you that way - as a collection of compelling sexual organs the possession of which doomed you to ridicule-worthy tastes and concerns.” There was David Foster Wallace, who, in a 1997 review, popularized the epithet (attributed to a female friend), “Just a penis with a thesaurus.” Then there was the writer Emily Gould, who placed him among the “midcentury misogynists” - a pantheon that also included Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. LIKE SO MANY WOMEN who came of age after the turn of the millennium, I was warned about John Updike almost as soon as I became aware of him. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |