Short Story Criticism | Johnson, Denis - John Updike (review date 24 July 2000)

John Updike (review date 24 July 2000)

SOURCE: Updike, John. “Dog's Tears.” New Yorker 76, no. 120 (24 July 2000): 76-8.

[In the following review, Updike unfavorably compares The Name of the World to Johnson's earlier work, especially Jesus' Son.]

There is a kind of radiant prose, sparking in short circuits, that can be achieved only through a point of view that is youthful and stoned:

I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.

It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find. We ended up in a laundromat, where the guy took off his...

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