My antagonism toward the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them, is far milder than might be expected, and mostly takes the form of my wanting to wrestle them at sleepovers, slowly but inexorably, through the use of black magic, turning them into lumberjack lesbians. Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing.
Was I wrong about the rest? Had I misremembered certain splendours? It was possible. (Women! Let your husbands come on your ass extremely soon after you give birth or else you will drown your own baby!) I assumed he would continue in this general tradition, his landscapes delicately dotted with the dandelions of misogyny. I read Rabbit, Run when I was 12 with a sense of accumulating speed and transport I have rarely felt since, though a confusion about what exactly Rabbit was doing to Janice’s ass in that fateful scene persisted into adulthood and probably did lasting damage. I began from a place of love, the charmed garden of his early novels, stories and critical essays. There’s so much of him, spread over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike.
Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. Today, he has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: died of pussy-hounding. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.) ‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said.
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‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail.
But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. Princeton's WordNet (0.I was hired as an assassin.
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