Welcome

A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

To read about movies and TV shows I'm watching, visit my other blog: Elliot's Watching

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Would Updike's 4th novel have been published today?

I'm reading, for the first time, surprisingly, John Updike's 4th novel, Of the Farm (1965), which has just been reissued as one of 4 novels in the 1st vol. of the Library of America Updike series. (That volume not yet available in my local library, but they did have Of the Farm in single volume; as it happens, so did I.) The question puzzling me is: Would this novel be published today? Compared w/ most contemporary fiction, literary fiction specifically, OTF seems slow, almost minute in its pace and attention to detail, and the narrative - at least so far (about half-way) - is devoid of drama and trauma. I can easily imagine a string of polite rejection letters (albeit, this was published after Rabbit, Run and the award0-winning Centaur, so there's that). The story, in brief, centered on an Updike-like man, a professional man (we don't know his profession) from NYC recently remarried after tough divorce (days after, in fact) takes his wife and 11-year-old stepson (ridiculously precocious - Updike never write too well about children unless the children were early versions of himself) to visit his domineering and cutting mother on the family farm in Pa., with the question looming of should they sell the hard-to-maintain farm? A series of small disputes and discomforts, as the 4 of them shift about, ensures; in a novel today, something exciting or traumatic would/will happen: There are many ominous comments about plowing the field w/ an old tractor and the injury or death that could ensue, but, at least so far, the only ones endangered some nesting quail. All this said, the writing as always is astonishingly observant and insightful and at times beautiful - here's where I'm glad I'm reading my own pb volume, as I'm marking up all of the margins with check-marks noting passages of unusual beauty or originality. Yes, this is why we still read Updike - and if he'd been staring out today he'd be a different writer, or else an unpublished one, "far behind his rightful time."

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.