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More Matter: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike
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John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and -- in a concluding section, "Personal Matters" -- paragraphs on himself and his work. More matter, indeed, in an age which, his introduction states, wants "real stuff -- the dirt, the poop, the nitty gritty -- and not . . . the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction."
Still, the fiction writer's affectionate, shaping hand can be detected in many of these considerations. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Biographies of Isaac Newton and Queen Elizabeth II, Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Benchley and Helen Keller, are reviewed, always with a lively empathy. Two especially scholarly disquisitions array twentieth-century writing about New York City and sketch the ancient linkage between religion and literature. An illustrated section contains sharp-eyed impressions of movies, photographs, and art. Even the slightest of these pieces can twinkle.
Updike is a writer for whom print is a mode of happiness: he says of his younger self, "The magazine rack at the corner drugstore beguiled me with its tough gloss," and goes on to claim, "An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried."
- Sales Rank: #609002 in Books
- Published on: 1999-09-14
- Released on: 1999-09-14
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.54" h x 1.97" w x 6.67" l, 3.05 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 928 pages
Amazon.com Review
Ever since he made his two-pronged prose debut in 1959 with The Poorhouse Fair and The Same Door, John Updike has delivered approximately one work of fiction per year. Few modern novelists have approached this level of productivity, which suggests a kind of late-Victorian stamina and linguistic lust for life. Even fewer have simultaneously churned out, as Updike has, a constant stream of reviews, essays, reminiscences, and occasional pieces. His custom is to collect this abundance every decade or so, disguising the substantial nature of these volumes with throwaway titles like Picked-Up Pieces and Odd Jobs. The latest such cornucopia is More Matter--and, like its predecessors, this 928-page behemoth reminds us that Updike is among our most discerning and omnivorous critics.
His title, this time, echoes Queen Gertrude's editorial advice to Polonius: "More matter, with less art." Only reluctantly does Updike assent to our age's appetite for facts, facts, and more facts, with fiction relegated to a kind of imaginative finger bowl: Human curiosity, the abettor and stimulant of the fiction surge between Robinson Crusoe's adventures and Constance Chatterley's, has become ever more literal-minded and impatient with the proxies of the imagination. Present taste runs to the down-home divulgences of the talk show--psychotherapeutic confession turned into public circus--and to investigative journalism that, like so many heat-seeking missiles, seeks out the intimate truths, the very genitals, of Presidents and princesses. Strong stuff, that last line, especially from the man whom Nicholson Baker called "the first novelist to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphoric prose."
But if Updike's critical investigations tend to stay above the belt, they remain as wide-ranging and elegant as ever. In More Matter, he takes on Herman Melville and Mickey Mouse, Abraham Lincoln and the male body--not to mention the cream of modern cosmology. His formulations on almost any subject seem ripe for the commonplace book. Here he is on sexual appetite: "Lust, which begins in a glance of the eye, is a searching, and its consummation, step by step, a knowing." On the short story: "The inner spaces that a good short story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion." On the austerity of biblical narrative: "The original Gospels evince a flinty terseness, a refusal, or inability, to provide the close focus and cinematic highlighting that the modern mind expects." And finally, on the raw intimacies of John Cheever's published journals: His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the deep gulf between outward appearance and inward condition; they present, with an almost unbearable fullness, a post-Adamic man, an unreconciled bundle of cravings and complaints, whose consolations--the glory of the sky, the company of his young sons--have the ring of hollow cheer in the vastness of his dissatisfaction. Comparatively, the journals of Kierkegaard and Emerson are complacent and academic. These sentences neatly unite the author's literary and theological concerns--although the latter topic takes something of a back seat in More Matter--and remind us of the compound pleasures of his prose. In his preface, Updike refers to the book as "my fifth such collection and--dare we hope?--my last." We very much hope not. --James Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
Many American writers this century have been called brilliant and accomplished, but Updike is the real thing, as this huge collection of personal essays, social commentary, book reviews, introductions, interviews and occasional pieces amply attests. It is astonishing that a volume of nearly 200 piecesAmost written for such intellectual venues as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, but some penned for the mass audiences of Newsweek and USAir MagazineArepresents only eight years' work at a time when Updike was producing roughly a novel every two years. But perhaps even more surprising is his range, depth and originality. Segueing freely from the latest biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the nature of evil to cars, cartoons and burglar alarms, these essays are bursting with sentiments and observations that defy ideology or neat categorization. Just when you think Updike is a cultural conservative (he deems young men's haircuts "hostile," mocks Borges and debates the serial comma), he defends Jacques Derrida (against Camille Paglia, no less). Just when you think he is refined and cautious (shaving the metaphysical line between "freedom" and "equality"), he turns irreverent (referring to Helen Keller jokes and "God in a lilac shortie nightgown" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Some pieces are prophetic, such as his comments in 1996 on our fascination with the Titanic disaster. Unlike most journalism, Updike's occasional writing is so exquisite as to repay multiple readings. And not least among the many virtues of this book, the 50th of his career, is its sheer fact of convenient assembly. BOMC alternate selection. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In his 50th book, Updike gathers eight years' worth of occasional pieces, book reviews, awards speeches, autobiographical ruminations, and cultural criticism. He plies his well-honed literary craftsmanship on subjects ranging from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard and the quasi-American rodent Mickey Mouse to photography, cartooning, and his favorite author, Henry Green. In an essay on old movie houses, for example, Updike remarks that although television's flood of sitcoms may not be much "crasser or more mechanical than the run of old-fashioned Hollywood fare," the motion picture "for Americans was our native opera, bastard and sublime." His astonishing introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville offers such a complete and evenhanded portrait of Melville's life and work that he reminds us what literary criticism used to be like in the hands of masters. Updike's wide-ranging literary sensibility, breathtaking cultural breadth, elegant prose, incisive wit, and gracious style far outstrip the works of his contemporaries like Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth, and this collection makes it clearer than ever that Updike is our preeminent man of letters. An essential purchase.
-AHenry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Updike rules!
By Jim Kibble
Usually I'd be happy to let Updike fend for himself, but the misguided comments below finally got my goat. His status as a first-rate critic--not to mention a first-rate novelist and essayist--is so glaringly apparent that I must take Mr. Finn's remarks as perverse contrarianism. And that goes double for his loopy defense of Tom Wolfe, whose amusing and observant novels can't hold a candle to the brilliance of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series. Do you really believe that 100 years from now, old men will be uttering lines from "A Man in Full" on their deathbeds? What an absurdity!
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
More is More
By Mark K. Jensen
One of the most annoying things about many of the reviews that accompanied the publication of *More Matter* in the fall of 1999 was the ungrateful tone of reviewers who complained about the heft, the bulk, the sheer immensity, the allegedly self-indulgent inclusiveness of Updike's most recent collection of prose. Containing -- by my count and including the preface -- some 191 separate items, the size of this assemblage of "Essays and Criticism" (as Updike subtitles the volume, despite his protestation on page 810 that "I write not criticism but book reviews") would seem to justify such complaints. But such carping must really have been due to the understandable and forgivable (albeit unprofessional) readerly fatigue of grubstreet reviewers laboring against a deadline. Their griping is as absurd as nieces and nephews complaining that some rich uncle has left them too much money. The grace and insight that have marked Updike's prose since he became a professional writer almost fifty years ago distinguish every page of this collection.
The volume is arranged in four parts. About 100 pages address "Large Matters"; in this election year, it would be well if every American read the first piece, on freedom and equality. Five hundred pages consist of "Matter under Review," mostly book reviews but including some articles that a candid Updike would have to admit to be genuine criticism, since they go far beyond the "matter under review." Especially good are essays on Mickey Mouse, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Camille Paglia, and the Titanic, as well as collective reviews on (1) the novel per se, (2) five books on evil, (3) sex and fashion, and (4) the new edition of *Fowler's Modern English Usage*. (Other readers will have their own favorites, of course.) The third part, entitled "Visible Matters," contains about 100 pages, mostly on movies and art. Here I especially liked a personal essay on a 1941 photograph, a piece entitled "Descent of an Image" on the famous Iwo Jima photograph, a review of a book of 19th-century photographs of the dead and dying, and a historical exploration of the relationship of Daniel Webster and a portrait painter named Sarah Goodridge. *More Matter* concludes with about 100 pages on "Personal Matters"; leading off is a Borgesian teaser entitled "Updike and I" that will doubtless become an anthology piece, and further in lies Henry Bech's hilarious account of interviewing Updike. As he grows ever more eminent, the author of *Self-Consciousness* takes increasing delight in satirizing himself.
John Updike's first serious ambitions were, it seems, directed toward the visual arts. What is sometimes a weakness in his fiction -- the obsessive, voyeuristic need to *see* -- is, when he turns to non-fiction, almost always a strength. Is this because he can then spare himself the effort of conjuring up his subject before his mind's eye and devote all of his discriminating intelligence to the task of understanding and seeing *into* the matter at hand? Updike believes that "devotion to reality's exact details . . . characterizes literary masters" (p. 697) -- a category in whose first rank Updike will, surely, long remain. If you love literature, you'll be grateful for *More Matter*.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Information pack rat
By Mary E. Sibley
One learns here that Helen Keller was not a spontaneous writer and that the author, John Updike, felt as a younger person that it was almost unethical for Sinclair Lewis to mock the pretensions of the middle class. Updike is indefatigable and inclusive in his enthusiastic embrace of arts and letters. Kierkegaard's method is dictated by his volatile temperament it is reported. Melville had a great-hearted truthfulness. For a novelist, it is asserted, the halls of memory and imagination are adjacent spaces. Updike holds that Edith Wharton was a writer of empathy. He regrets that the Library of America produced such a skimpy selection of Sinclair Lewis's works.
Wallace Stevens is of particular interest to Updike because he came from Reading, PA. He finds that the journals of Edmund Wilson are not quite literature but delightful anyhow. He believes that Wilson's energetic entries stimulate our appetite for literature. Happiness is a recurrent theme in Nabakov.
Updike notes that the way of doing business, a comparative rarity in literature, is covered in GAIN by Richard Powers. Tom Wolfe is accused by John Updike of serving up preening expert architectural details in A MAN IN FULL. Alice Munro's stories are compared to those of Tolstoy and Chekhov. The metier of Marguerite Youcenar was aloofness. She used dignified diction. Frank Kermode believed that as a Manxman he was excluded from the life and the language of the English. Martin Amis's NIGHT TRAIN resembles the American tough guy school of crime fiction.
John Cheever cloaked family facts in the mythifying Wapshot chronicles. Theodore Dreiser was so dependent on other people for editorial services that his last two novels could be described as collaborations. Arguably Dreiser never recovered from the suppression of SISTER CARRIE by his own publisher. F. Scott Fitzgerald's life has become more celebrated than his fiction. Raymond Chandler felt tht Scott Fitzgerald just missed being a great writer. It is the wise suggestion of Updike that Fitzgerald, like Wordsworth, experienced in youth something transcendent. Biographies are called great scholastic mounds. Some of the more interesting essays involve one of two subjects--art and the NEW YORKER magazine.
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