Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)


Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)

Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)

SOURCE: “Magnanimous in a Big Way,” in New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1991, p. 12.

[In the following review, Amis offers a positive assessment of Odd Jobs.]

We often think in terms of literary pairs, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, etc. But what about literary opposites? Jorge Luis Borges versus Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholson Baker versus Leon Uris, Thomas Pynchon versus C. P. Snow, Norman Mailer versus Anita Brookner. John Updike has no obvious soul mate or near equivalent, unless it be Anthony Burgess, who boasts a similarly hyperactive cortex. But he does have an opposite, and a diametrical one Samuel Beckett.

Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for 18 hours or so, feeling entirely terrible, and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes....

[The entire page is 1617 words long]

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