Is this guy's career one massive prank? People heap praise upon this man and call him the greatest prose stylist in the English language. Yet I crack open a couple of his books to see a sample and his writing is not only below magnificent, it's below average. He doesn't seem to understand how to construct a sentence in a way that isn't incredibly clunky. And people claim he writes better than a Melville, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot etc.? What gives, it this just masturbatory journalism at work?
Prankish, masturbatory...yes. clunky? hell no.
>'The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. "Hey!" he shouts in pride. "Luck," one of the kids says."'
To me a lot of these sentences flow terribly.
They all look perfectly fine to me. I haven't even read Updike before, but I will now that I've seen this excerpt.
It'll probably get here within the week.
I agree that the first two sentences flow somewhat awkwardly. Haven't read the rest.
You don't actually understand flow. Ask yourself, what is setting the flow of this bit?
>You don't actually understand flow.
No, you don't understand flow.
>he cant see that the first sentence ricochets just like the ball
>he did not even take the hint
Also, he was quite young when he wrote this and almost no one praises it as some pinnacle of prose style, it has its moments and shows great potential (which he later met) but has faults and shows his inexperience and youth as a writer.
If you want to engage in this gnostic excercise of seeing the syntax as mimiquing the ball movements, okay. Still, something like
>it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard
reads terrible to me.
>gnostic excercise
lol. I would say he is mimicking the game more then the ball.
>prescription
You are looking at flow purely as a function of syntax and since the modernists subject has informed flow more directly which leads us to things like Gaddis's jarring subway ride or McCarthy's lazy drift down a river. Updike is clearly attempting to capture the flow of the game with this, as with most of Rabbit, Run I don't think he quite pulled off most of what he tried for but it has moments and led the way to better things. To say it does not flow is just admitting to not understanding flow and never bothering to ask yourself if there was a reason he wrote it this way.
I'm not going to approve of something simply based on the author's intention. For instance, I'm well aware that Kerouac was attempting to emulate jazz in his writing for On The Road. But just because he tried doesn't mean he did it well or that his prose sounded good. On the other hand, I think McCarthy did very well in mapping his flow to the situation in The Road.
In the same vein I think Updike failed to do what you're describing here well. Also, I read some excerpts of the sequel, Redux, and it had the same issues in my opinion. No basketball there.
No one said Updike did it well here and everyone itt who read has said the same thing as I did, that he did not pull it off. I really was not a fan of how The Road flowed, Suttree does it best for me despite the transitions being awkward at times. BM is more refined and better executed but I often feel like he was starting at a picture and describing it from left to right, I don't get the feeling of the vastness he was describing, it is too focused.
If you can not see flow as a function of subject then you do not understand flow from the modernist on, this is a simple fact.
It's funny you mention McCarthy right before I posted
. Many people whose opinion I respect make the argument that he is one of the most innovative stylists of recent decades, and perhaps they are right. But his his experimental syntax and avoidance of punctuation inherently opens itself up to an "Emperor's new clothes" type debate more so than the majority of Updike's writing.
I wouldn't personally call McCarthy innovative and I definitely agree that his writing is just as open to criticism as Updike's. I think Cork gets a lot of credit in non-literary (Hollywood) circles. To me the his worked while Updike's didn't though.
Well, I think every writer is open to criticism from many different angles. I think that's just the subjective nature of literature.
I think it is completely fair to believe that McCarthy's writing more successfully achieves it's desired impact than Updike's writing does. But I think it would be quite difficult to argue that Updike's writing contains as much semantic murkiness as McCarthy's.
>things. To say it does not flow is just admitting to not understanding flow
This is the problem anytime we actually have a good discussion going in in /lit with people giving insights and presenting opinions only for some autist to come raging in shouting how they’re right and if you have a different opinion it just means you don’t understand.
Add something of value or just don’t post.
Yeah, don’t waste your time. He’ll just say you were filtered, or call you a pseud or tell you to go back to redit. It’s one of the reasons this place is dying. We used to have some really effort posters, but the autists couched in irony afraid of sincere posting in case they exposed their own ignorance drove them away.
So I should have been sincere by telling him he understood flow even if he did not? Instead I was being ironic by being honest and direct? How ironic.
I would just work through the Rabbit series, despite its flaws it is great and he absolutely works the style out later in the series. Rabbit, Run would have been forgotten if it was not for the rest of the series, especially the last two. They are fairly quick reading once you get into them.
sounds like you’re a newfag. it’s always been easier to shout insults. an anonymous image forum isn’t really conducive to deep discussion. you can accept that or leave :/
Word choice, sentence structure, punctuation. To examine just one part:
>"As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke"
The insertion of hushed after stare sounds very awkward. It should either be an adverb or an adjective with commas around it. Sounds odd to describe the boys with an adjective in that spot as is.
Similar issue with the part that begins with "squinting," it lacks necessary commas.
This last one is personal preference, I don't like the use of the verb sight there. I think a synonym would likely sound better.
I see the sprung rhythm of that sentence is completely lost on you. As is the tension it deliberately sets up by its camera-shutter capture of details. Everything is building towards Rabbit's subsequent bully shot and the feeling of euphoria is engenders in him, reminding him of his lost days as a school sports hero.
Idk sounds fine to be but not the best. I could just be illiterate though. I don’t like the accusation that “you just don’t understand flow!” It isn’t math. Isn’t it something that your supposed to feel out? If your literate and it feels clunky it feels clunky.
>Isn’t it something that your supposed to feel out?
Not at all. Before the modernist flow was largely a function of style and external to the novel with the story having only a minor effect, generally only on the speed of that flow. With the modernist flow became more a function of story, what happens in the story affects flow. For example, if there is absolute chaos happening in the story the flow may be absolute chaos and not flow at all in the traditional sense, it could be jarring and changing rapidly with no transition between those changes. So the question of how well something flows becomes the question of how well does it achieve what the author was going for? Did the disruption of the flow and chaotic lack of flow effectively convey the chaos in the story? How well did it achieve what the author was going for? You should ask yourself why if something does not flow or flows poorly, ask if it was intentional and move on to judge it from there.
Beckett is a good example of this and general exploiting of flow for things more than style to the point he sort of brought it back around and it became part of his style, books have been written on his use of this.
I see what you're saying but it's not like modernists stopped using flow with the goal of simply creating beautiful prose. Compare this passage by Joseph Conrad with Updike's description:
>Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour. Strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace—to die by its will.
It's still a function of the story, of what is being described, but primarily I think he is simply trying to create musical qualities in the flow and rhythm of the prose.
>It's still a function of the story,
To a point, Conrad had a foot in romanticism and his prose reflects that. What does Rabbit romanticize? What is beautiful to him? What is his language and his life? This is what Updike was going for, it is not Updike's beauty or a romantic ideal of beauty, it is Rabbit and the beauty Updike can find in Rabbit; the narrator is like him and understands him, has sympathy and empathy for him. In Rabbit, Run he does not quite hit the mark but he does a decent enough job with some amazing moments and he absolutely nails it before the end of the series.
I suspect much of what causes people issues with Rabbit is it being written in the present tense which restricts the ways an author can exploit flow, they can only suspend the moment within reason.
That is from Outcast of the Sea? Been years since I have read Conrad.
there’s no right answer. it can be a reflection of the contents of the narrative, it can be the unique expression of an author’s voice, and it may even be that poetic/metaphorical style writing often associated with “beautiful” writing. anyone telling you this is the one correct way and that you don’t understand if you don’t agree is trying to box art into a paint-by-numbers object so that they can grasp it better. literature, and all art, is not black or white, correct or incorrect.
Yeah, it’s from “Rabbit, Run”, one of his first novels and indeed one of his clunkiest, but even for a first novel it’s still pretty good. I guess people here are praising it because of the contrarian argumentative tendency of LULZposters and because it’s “supposed” to be good. When he gets to later novels like Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich and really hits his stride, his style and mastery of language seems to have progressed immeasurably.
Meh. Harry Potter is better than this and that's saying something.
Who is it? Why do you assume everyone knows what a particular author looks like?
I find him a bit slimy but there's no question he can write.
It's John Updike. I agree, people who post pictures of people without giving names are annoying.
it's not unreasonable to expect a literate audience to be familiar with one of the most recognizable mugs in modern lit
where's his brain?
What novel(s) were you reading from?
Let's keep in mind that even Updike's most fervent readers (of which I am one) do not claim that Updike is, wholesale, a better writer than those writers you listed. With the possible exception of Woolf, I think most would concede that they are, all in all, better writers than Updike. Or at least more significant.
In terms of thematic depth and scope, Moby Dick surpasses just about everything Updike wrote. Joyce is certainly much more innovative and significant in terms of form and structure, and has far greater intellectual scope than Updike. But as a prose stylist, I believe Updike does actually surpass Joyce at times (and the same thing can be said about Waugh).
Frankly, as innovative and brilliant as Joyce was, large portions of Ulysses consists of some pretty "ugly" prose.
I could be wrong but I get the sense that you have read very little of Updike's work and happened upon a lackluster passage of his. As subjective as literary criticism is, the claim that Updike's strength is a below average prose stylist is pretty much demonstratively false.
Important to note that the Rabbit novels, (especially Rabbit, Run) are looser in style and more "free flowing" than most of Updike's other novels. He admittedly utilizes a high degree of comma splices and sentence fragments, but not more so than other post-Joycean writers who seek to mimic their characters inner lives through their prose.
With most of Updike's other fiction the sentences are pristine and syntactically conventional. This is even more the case with his literary criticism. In my view they are just not the kinds of sentences that allow one to wonder if some sort of "Emperor's new clothes" type thing is occurring. They land.
What book of his should I read first then?
I think The Road really emphasized the bleakness of their situation with its structure. Haven't read anything else by him though
The Rabbit novels are absolutely dreadful dross, and seeing this gnomish visage one can see why.
tough but fair
Anyone of this ethnicity pushed to fame for their achievements is either over promoted or a ghost writing project.
They have no natural creativity. They cannot make art. Hard to believe for normies perhaps, but it's true.
He isn't israeli you stupid fucking chudcel.
At least he had an ethnicity, unlike the mystery-meat Americans of today.
Those are also ethnicities
>They have no natural creativity. They cannot make art. Hard to believe for normies perhaps, but it's true.
You're being too harsh on the Dutch but I agree
On the topic of flow and sentence structure being used to enhance writing, what's your favorite example? I think mine is this excerpt from Orlando by Woolf.
>'Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts, frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr Dupper catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book. And they thrust Queen Mary’s prayer book in his hands and he searched, hastily fluttering the pages, and said, ‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Lady Orlando, kneel down’; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud and faint alternately, and Mr Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all was quiet for a moment, and one word — it might be ‘the jaws of death’— rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang loud and others prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger, went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he answered her Orlando! and the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.'
?si=qwAUcz60zOIgRc6l&t=863
>I predicted that John Updike's books would start to go out of print as soon as he did, as soon as he lost his pulse, as soon as he died, I predicted that his works out in the fringes would start to go out of print and that would work their way into those wretched Bech books and that they'd all be gone eventually and I guarantee you I will be right. By 2030 at the latest, at the very latest, there'll be no John Updike in print and people won't know who he is, they won't have any idea who he is.
LoA.
There has been some decent Updike threads recently which I find a little odd. Shame I only read the first Rabbit book and forget everything so I have nothing to add but encouragement