John Updike is dead

I do like Updike, on occasion. Couples is maybe the most exquisitely uncomfortable book I've ever read. I much prefer him to Roth.

But I don't really think either should be bracketed alongside Bellow. Bellow is incandescent. He's in the company of Melville and Scott Fitzgerald, not those schmucks.

yeah i've never read updike----i have the centaur at home
nor bellow

not sure why i am posting in this thread

I love Humboldt's Gift too, though there's too much of it. I think he needed a better editor there: the sheer volume detracts. Also, a bit of a shoddy way to treat Delmore Schwartz, I think.

Read some Bellow, empty mirror, it will enhance your life. I can't remember my life before reading Augie. I actually shed tears and burst out laughing in the space of one twenty minute bus journey reading that book. That surprised me as much as my fellow commuters.

craner said:

But I don't really think either should be bracketed alongside Bellow. Bellow is incandescent. He's in the company of Melville and Scott Fitzgerald, not those schmucks.

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These are big words. I should check him out.

I've only heard bad things about Updike though, so I've always been a bit reluctant about him. This thread, I suppose, adding to the list of bad things I've heard about Updike.

Craner is right to big up Bellow but not necessarily at the expense of Roth, nor Updike.

I would recommend Couples/Roger's Version/all 4 Rabbits for Updike

Bellow - has to be Augie then Heartbreak/ Herzog/ Sieze The Day

I think Roth is the one who is up there with Melville but I am aware that we are unlikely to agree on this.

I'm more interested, in a way, as to why Luka has had such an extreme reaction to the Grand Old Men.

Anyway, I suppose my triumvirate should be expanded to include DeLillo/Pynchon/McCarthy now as the grand old men? (btw I am aware of much of the irony and redundancy in thinking in these terms but it is good for sparking a bit of lively disagreement)

I know, you're right Jenks. I love Roth's style, he can write as beautifully as Bellow at times, as can Updike actually...but I have a real sticking point with Roth. I haven't read all of his books, mind you, but for example, I really reacted badly to The Anatomy Lesson. The voice was vile: too cynical and harsh even for me.

Bellow has a big heart and a big imagination and poetry that dwarfs the others, and puts him with the greats, I think.

I could have expressed this better, I realise.

US novelists?

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Moby-Dick
Faulkner

Scott Fitzgerald

Bellow

? ? ?

(i know Philip Mind quite likes some of Richard Ford.)

p.s.
deliberately frozen-in-amber Harold Bloom style graph (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to get discussion going..

Luke has a personal antipathy to Bellow, that even I can't explain. He thinks Bellow has "a weird problem with black people" which I assume comes from passages in Mr Sammler's Planet, where Bellow was depicting and expressing the real and historical antagonism between urban jews and blacks in Chicago and New York during the 60s-70s.

Weirdly, considering his hatred of Bellow's politics, he liked Ravelstein.

Despite studying American Literature at University I've read hardly any American literature. This is half my own fault and half the fault of my rubbish course, I suppose. I've read 'Portnoy's Complaint', 'American Pastoral' and 'Everyman' by Roth, the first of which is by far the funniest and the last of which is probably the best, unencumbered as it is by 'BIG IDEAS' (as 'American Pastoral' is). Roth has that voice which is so overpowering and often remarkably athletic and explosive, but so relentlessly loud and exhausting... there isn't much subtlety in what I've read of him, which works when he's in comic mode, painting grotesque pictures of debased sexuality and shameful social dysfunction etc.. but when he's got a message to put across - boy, does he put it across.

The only Bellow I read was the first 100 pages or so of 'Herzog', which I enjoyed until there was a lengthy conversation entirely conducted in french (at which point I was hurled into an apoplectic fit of rage, started hurling my own shit at the walls and eventually decided to read 'The Guv'nor' instead).

''Invisible Man'' was probably the best American novel I read at University, all things considered (that is, if ''Lolita'' doesn't count).

I've just remembered that I (shamefully) gave up on ''As I Lay Dying'' after about a hundred pages of screwing up my face in frustration, I probably should go back and read it, really. I only read a couple of short stories by Henry James (excellent stuff though) and ''Benito Cereno'' by Melville... And a bit of Pynchon (''Entropy''), Carver etc... Loved Whitman and Emerson at the time, too.

I need to re-explore Roth, I think.

craner said:

I need to re-explore Roth, I think.

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I think so too.

And I'll go out and buy Bellow's Collected Stories.

Even on his own thread Updike gets bumped!

Cormac McCarthy is an interesting one. Blood Meridian is quite superb...but then again, I'm not sure his style really survives close scrutiny. He's very close to being a bad writer...and yet people love those enormous sentences, all those "ands". Maybe only he can get away with it, and maybe only in that superb novel. Though I also really liked The Crossing.

i am able to to discuss this i suppose. in a reasoned way.
but possibly not so you'd understand. i'm not sure. i will try later, when im in a less antagonisitc, volatile mood. essentially its just a difference in sensibility. its not just about all the predatory black characters, thats really just a side issue.

craner said:

Cormac McCarthy is an interesting one. Blood Meridian is quite superb...but then again, I'm not sure his style really survives close scrutiny. He's very close to being a bad writer...and yet people love those enormous sentences, all those "ands". Maybe only he can get away with it, and maybe only in that superb novel. Though I also really liked The Crossing.

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Blood Meridian and The Crossing are both incredible books, you're definitely right to pick out those two as his best. But his later stuff like The Road and No country for old Men are great too. Much shorter, minimal sentences yet somehow still very recognisable as the writer of Blood Meridian. he's an amazing stylist in that way and its interesting to see how he developed and refined his style but kept that apocalyptic, almost biblical feel to his writing. Definitely one of the greats. I found some of his pre-BM stuff a bit hard going though. Has anyone here actually managed to get through 'Suttree'? Cos I found that one totally impenetrable after several aborted attempts...

Not read any Updike though, maybe I should :slanted:

my thoughts diverge so wildly from yours im not even sure my opinion can even mean anything to you. which is why i wondered if it was possible to communicate with you. not becasue i am so deep and wise, just there there is so much empty space between us. jenks, frankly, if you siggested de lillio was competent it would make me question your jedgement. for you to bracket him with 'the greats' makes me wonder if we're talking about the same de lillo. i've read about 4 or 5 bellows (i can't remember what they were called as they all belnd into one big sloppy mushy mass in my mind) de lillo ive read white noise, mao II, a couple of others and underworld. the others I(roth updike whoever) i've tried to read but i found so offensively bad i couldnt finish. well ok, bad is the wrong word. i admit it, my objections are moral. i find them repellent. the prose i suppose, is servicable, often enough, better than i could do im sure. my attempts to write prose never amount to much. why they offend my delicate sensibilities? well, christ i dunno. for a start i suppose my biggest problem is the meaness. its part of the american thing i guess. as i say, i should wait till i am in a calmer more generous state of mind.... look, think of american comedy, the snideness of seinfeld for example. its an american thing. i find it inhuman and grotesque. most of you lot love and you're welcome to it. i know i won't be changing any minds.
ridiculing people for the way the dress, for the eccentricites of their behaviour. its a mindset. dont ask me to define it further. i dont want to. you must know what i mean. and oliver you know exactly where our difference lie. you knwo exactly. becasue i've spelled them out time and time again, most recently i think, in my response to your last attempts to write for the blog. and you know how those difference inform our responses to novellists like bellow. here are some keywords to refresh your memory, surfaces, seduction, money, power, intrigue, clothes, beautiful cruel women.
i don't mind trying to explain this to other people but you do know where im coming from. maybe updike does describe being alive very precisely for a lot of you and if thats so, well, great acheivement. but it cant talk to me, becasue i cant feel the pulll of it. life is not like that for me. it doesn't feel like that. theres a whole dimension missing for me. the whole realm of the imagination is missing in all these writers. dont misinterpret me. i mean imagination in the grand blakean sense. i dont read novels. i dont like them. i think they.re absurd for most part. i can read dostoyevsky and i can read kafka and conrad (yes how very pompous etc) but beyond that, i dunno, i dont like it, why not journalism. if youre so cncerned with life on that level, then why not? journalism can be extremely powerful. its the proper tool for those investigations.
so as i say difference in sensibility. i like poems and stuff. i like imagination. i like superstructure. big shifting tectonic plates. that funny sneering burroughs line about infinite diversity of life, thats what i tak those people as doing, being so transfixed by 'infinite diversity of life' that they miss the things which, to me at leasst, are the important ones.
and perhaps i dont respond to the making yourself a patheitc 'human' charcter, and detailing all the pratfalls and humiliations. i find it seedy. i like the muscular whitman self as hero thing. i can go on but i suspect you lot will just queue up to rain scorn down upon me and im not sure im up for that.

Benny B said:

Blood Meridian and The Crossing are both incredible books, you're definitely right to pick out those two as his best. But his later stuff like The Road and No country for old Men are great too. Much shorter, minimal sentences yet somehow still very recognisable as the writer of Blood Meridian. he's an amazing stylist in that way and its interesting to see how he developed and refined his style but kept that apocalyptic, almost biblical feel to his writing. Definitely one of the greats. I found some of his pre-BM stuff a bit hard going though. Has anyone here actually managed to get through 'Suttree'? Cos I found that one totally impenetrable after several aborted attempts...

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i think you're rather persuasively eloquent on his shorter stuff Benny, nice one. (i've never read CM. in fact i agonised for about three weeks last year about whether i should see No Country at the cinema before i'd read the book, though eventually succumbing..)

have you read Outer Dark? (as i read a CM fan mention it once and are curious.)

im just not interested in writing i suppose. im not interested in style. im not interested in sentences.

beautifully felt Luke.
well said.

luka said:

i can read dostoyevsky and i can read kafka and conrad (yes how very pompous etc) but beyond that, i dunno, i dont like it, why not journalism. if youre so cncerned with life on that level, then why not? journalism can be extremely powerful. its the proper tool for those investigations.

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those first three blokes you mentioned: well, you don't need much else in the service of novels, do you, tbf.

on the journalism tip, you remind me of Tom Wolfe in an introduction to '...Vanities' exhorting certain Zola as a supreme novel form, and how the best prose as he was writing his intro (early 90's edition IIRC) that he was encountering was, for him, journalism.

interestingly enough, when Vanity Fair (and Brad Pitt wrote the piece!) gave a journalism award out sometime last year, it went to Human Rights Watch, as HRW were doing some of the most compelling journalism around, they said.
(hard to argue if you're a regular reader of their reports.)