Craft

Very much taken by surprise at the news of John Updike's death. The first reference I saw was in an e-mail from Tuck Leong concerning material for TOK and I thought he might have got it wrong. After all, it was less than a week since I'd been reading a review of the latest Eastwick novel and Updike's essays have been appearing regularly in The New York Review of Books. It turns out they were coming from a man in the grip of one of the worst kinds of terminal illness.

I can't say he was ever one of my favourite writers (though the nightmare sequence of the baby's death in Rabbit, Run is one of the most powerful things in the twentieth century novel) and generally I preferred the essays to the imaginative fiction, but this was a man to be admired for extraordinary craft and facility.

It was nice to see a well-written tribute in The Straits Times which rather tellingly picked up on how bad Updike could be when writing about sex. But then again most writers are. (Why?) This put me in mind of a question one of my students asked last year when I was talking about Alice Walker's portrayal of female sexual experience in The Color Purple - something along the lines of which author I thought rendered male sexual experience effectively. I had no answer at the time, but I'll attempt one now, and, I suppose, a fairly obvious one. I think Joyce gets it right, specifically in Ulysses, and I think he does so as, in that craftiest of all novels, somehow he gets beyond craft.