Contemporary Literary Criticism | Brookner, Anita (Vol. 134) - John Updike （review date 1 May 1989）

John Updike （review date 1 May 1989）

SOURCE: “Nice Tries,” in New Yorker, May 1, 1989, pp. 111-14.

[In the following excerpt, American novelist Updike offers a positive evaluation of Latecomers.]

In a decade when the differences between the sexes are on the one hand being minimized （equal pay for equal work, males should learn to dust and cook, females are scoring better in spatial-relations tests all the time） and on the other schematized （women want relationships, men want achievements, their wavelengths are so different the signals pass right through）, it takes some nerve for an author to attempt a protagonist of the opposite sex. Tolstoy did it, George Eliot did it, but that was long ago, when classics walked the earth and women and men were simpler mechanisms, as their hoopskirts and stovepipe hats signified. Yet here, right on my bedside table, two bright, brave, bay-laden novelists whose names begin with “B”...

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