Contemporary Literary Criticism | Cozzens, James Gould (Vol. 92) - John Updike (review date 2 November 1968)

John Updike (review date 2 November 1968)

SOURCE: "Indifference," in Picked-Up Pieces, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, pp. 416-22.

[Updike is a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, critic, short story writer, essayist, poet, and dramatist. In the review below, originally published November 2, 1968, in The New Yorker, he faults Morning Noon and Night for its stuffy, tedious, pessimistic, and pedantic style.]

Beginning, forty years ago, with a style of sober purity, James Gould Cozzens has purposefully evolved a prose unique in its mannered ugliness, a monstrous mix of Sir Thomas Browne, legalese, and Best-Remembered Quotations. The opening chapter of his new novel, Morning Noon and Night, cloudy as a polluted pond, swarms with verbal organisms of his strange engendering. As Cozzen-sologists before me have discovered, there is no substitute for the tabulated list. We have the Unresisted Cliché:

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