Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Carrère, Emmanuel - John Updike (review date 4 July 1988)

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John Updike (review date 4 July 1988)

SOURCE: "Frenchmen: Small Packages," in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, pp. 404-12.

[Updike is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, critic, short story writer, poet, essayist, and dramatist. In the following excerpt, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in July 1988, he praises The Mustache as "a nightmare of slippage the author pulled quickly from the placid yuppie textures of the life around him."]

The young French writer Emmanuel Carrère is … a formidable magnifier, at least in The Mustache. It is his third novel; his second, Bravoure, won two prizes, the Prix Passion and the Prix de la Vocation, and this one comes to translation into English bedecked with Franco-American praise. The tale's point of departure seems as trivial as a pigeon in the hall: a young Parisian architect, left nameless, decides to shave off the mustache he...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Philip H. Solomon (review date May 1987)
   2. John Gross (review date 1 April 1988)
   3. Oliver Conant (review date 17 April 1988)
   4. John Updike (review date 4 July 1988)
   5. Irving Malin (review date Spring 1989)
   6. Publishers Weekly (review date 25 May 1990)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 22 July 1990)
   8. Scott Winnett (review date November 1990)
   9. R. R. K. (review date November-December 1990)
   10. Faren Miller (review date December 1990)
4. Copyright

1. John Updike