Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Rabbit Done

John Updike, relentless chronicler of something or other, has glissando'd off this mortal side yard to those distant, silvery shores where pre-post-Protestant New Yorkerites go to over-punctuate their unmemorable sentences forever. The first pages of Rabbit, Run are some of the most embarrassing prose ever set to paper, and although he reviewed books for years, decades, centuries at The New Yorker, I can't recall a single thing he ever said.

Posted by IOZ at 1:22 PM | email »
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

But you remember what he wrote, right?

3:32 PM
Anonymous said...

And like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, Stephen King and even Gallagher, he monumentally overstated his own importance and ability.

I won't miss the boring son of a bitch nor his laments regarding failed erections.

3:33 PM
Anonymous said...

Suburban no exit....oh, the anxt. It's enough to give ennui some energy.

4:55 PM
Pfallon said...

He was number 38 on The Beast's 2008 Most Loathsome Americans list: http://www.buffalobeast.com/134/50mostloathsome2008.html

John Updike

Charges: Being foolishly wrong about absolutely everything for about a thousand years and counting. Getting rich applying faux gilt, and guilt, to the dull, pointless, overstuffed lives of New Yorker readers. Systematically tackles the big issues, and is subsequently dragged by them right into the end zone like Bo Jackson dragged Brian Bosworth. Latest attempt to capture the zeitgeist, The Terrorist, resulted in unintentionally comic transposition of Congregationalist soap opera to the Semtex demographic. Won’t learn, won’t quit. Like the Energizer bunny, only dumber.

Exhibit A: Apparently immortal, always a mark of evil.

Sentence: Eternity working for minimum wage in a university photocopy shop.

6:17 PM
Anonymous said...

@Pfallon:

Huh. I wonder who wrote that.

8:02 PM
Mr.Fundamental said...

he was totally on your Death List for this year, wasn't he Monsieur?

8:25 AM
Anonymous said...

Who cares what the fuck you think, numbnuts?

7:36 PM
pfallon said...

Anon 8:02

Ya think rather than being an anonymous puke I used my name and url as some clever ruse? FYI, the writer was John Dolan of among other things The Exile.

6:47 PM
Will Divide said...

Another such NY'er chronicler of middle class immorality, Mr. John O'Hara, was HUGE, wrote a ton of novels, and then after he died vanished from bookshops faster than the Nevada dew.

Updike was entitled to write as meanly and as often as he desired. Astonishing is the acclaim he collected for decades for doing so.

10:42 AM

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