Widowmaker

It's become fashionable to slag Updike, but I call bullshit on that. Were there a search function on this blog, probably half of the posts mention him (the half that don't mention lucky John Maher of Manchester). Still pumping out a book a year, still the best writer of the last fifty years, sentence by sentence. Sorry, detractors.

That said, all I remember from Seek My Face is a detailed description of someone making tuna salad, and I put the atypically topical Terrorist away with a sigh upon realizing at one point that I was reading about a NJ high school counselor's morning reflections while looking out a window. Yes, suspenseful.

So, with a completist's obligation I cracked the unnecessary sequel The Widows of Eastwick, and hey! Guess what? It's good, at least two-thirds through! I wasn't fond of the predecessor, which seemed (ha!) to suffer from an overreliance on the blurring Joycean proto-psychedelia of Couples. But this crisp book has all sorts of good ruminations on regret and aging. If one is in the mood for that. Also, the travel sequences (characters go to China, Egypt and, um, Canada), while well-written, seem (heh) more like JU writing school themes on What He Did on his Last Three Vacations.

But who cares? The man's written 50+ books and I've done none! And until the awful, unimaginable day when his name shows up in the red reverse box across the top of CNN.com, I will continue to devour his stuff (after this, I will exclusively read Babar books [?]).

Plus, guess who is ahead of the curve and ready for the NEW NORMAL? Take that, Tom Wolfe!:






[Lord, in my slavish garrulousness, I forgot the original raison debt for this post! In his chidingly nitpickish way, Updike nails something in society at large that utterly sucks:

The mailbox, one of those new squat plastic ones molded in one piece with its
post and therefore impervious to the roaming vandals who batter metal detachable
ones, proclaimed in white stick-on letters THE LITTLEFIELD'S. The ignorant
apostrophe annoyed Alexandra.

Score one for the good guys!]