Like Saul Bellow, Updike often seems wantonly, uncontrollably fertile.” The worst passages appear as gussied up gab. Once into the suburbs of Rabbit criticism, a literary antimony is frequently found and typified by Martin Amis who wrote, “In every sense it constitutes an embarrassment of riches - alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and crank. Then again, flip side, at his blandest, Updike comes off like the Alex Katz of writing, the darling of those who prefer style like warm Cheez Whiz so it oozes down their throats without too much conscious swallowing. The tension inherent in allowing passages to hover in a middle space without commitment to one or the other intent is at times frustrating but that said, Updike deserves praise for a masterwork in free indirect discourse of which in my view we can never have enough examples.
Updike can recognizably follow Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant” but just as frequently his relaxed rhythms and details are neither here - furthering the story along with necessary thoughts by Rabbit, nor there - lapsing into a full stream of consciousness carried by linguistic brilliance as found for example in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. But Updike’s noticing and skewing of details is by far less than the whole of his novel, although this is the aspect upon which many critics dwell. The prose is that rarest of achievements - perfectly pitched voice for the subject.” Boroff, 1960). Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase catches the light. In an early review of Rabbit, Run David Boroff of The New York Times wrote, “The author’s style is particularly impressive artful and supple, its brilliance is belied by its relaxed rhythms.
0 kommentar(er)
