My style is greatly simplified from those days in Expository Writing class… much of what I write is read by ESL readers, and even native English speakers have little patience (or focus) for long constructions.

You should try his short stories. They are rarely about sex.

I don’t think much of Updike’s novels or his poetry. I suppose much of his poetic oeuvre would have to be better than “The Beautiful Bowel Movement” or the one about pulling the tampon out with his teeth, but those two discouraged me from exploring further. Updike’s stories are said to be good. They may be less about his bodily functions and extramarital relationships. We read the one about shooting the pigeons in the barn in school. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it.

Updike did keep the New Yorker from going overboard on the woke stuff. They’ve been liberal or progressive or left for some time, but old white guy Updike represented a demographic that no longer contributes to the magazine. David Foster Wallace’s critique of Updike is worth reading. I believe he called Updike (quoting a younger female acquaintance) “a penis with a thesaurus.” The review was an early sign that this century, at least in our corner of the world, and at least among men, may not be as sex-obsessed as the last:

https://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/

I hadn’t recently reread the tributes to Updike I wrote at the time of his death fifteen years ago. So I looked them up and was surprised to find that they were identical to what I’d just read.

Maybe the blog’s slow downs are “scraping” bots…?

–neo

That could explain my experience. “Towards the End of Time” is a terrible novel I once got for Christmas. It was not because Updike couldn’t maintain proper grammar nor pull off a decent metaphor. I was pleased to find David Foster Wallace calling out Updike:
_______________________________________

It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

–David Foster Wallace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toward_the_End_of_Time
_______________________________________

But those jewel-like stories Updike wrote for “The New Yorker” were another breed entirely.

LOL.

A lot of the time that moron turned out to be … me.

So far, whenever I have encountered my voice, I have been identified as the author. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Neo is a much better righter than I, so I am not surprised that she has encountered stuff that she recognized as her own, that wasn’t obviously attributed to her, and I have not.