A lyrical, lovely display of Updike’s protean powers.
A potpourri of pieces from the busy pen of the gifted Updike (1932-2009), who shows that he could write convincingly about nearly anything.
Using material the author left in a couple of boxes for just such a publication, editor Carduff (who assembled the two William Maxwell volumes for the Library of America) arranged the pieces in a way he judged consistent with Updike’s earlier collections (Picked-Up Pieces, 1975, etc.). The current volume contains poems and short fiction as well as book reviews, art criticism, forewords and afterwords, comments and letters and speeches. Reading them consecutively causes a reader’s jaw to drop in astonishment at the range of Updike’s talents and interests. There are valedictory pieces (an emotional poem about Massachusetts General Hospital, a piece about time’s effects on a writer); explicit reminders that a writer’s duty is to bring news to the reader; curmudgeonly complaints about crowded art exhibits; praise for colleagues; potshots at biographers (he did not care for Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, 2009); pieces that reveal his intimacy with subjects including Aimee Semple McPherson, the history of golf in Massachusetts, the drawings of Van Gogh, the planet Mars, the stories of his adopted town of Ipswich, Mass. Throughout are reminders of what readers lost when Updike died: the perfect word, the graceful sentences that somehow seem impossible to improve, the wry humor, the vast knowledge and the humility. In one essay, he identifies a handful of principles he followed in his book-reviewing, and in a dazzling long piece he talks about the genesis and composition of his four Rabbit novels—perhaps his greatest literary achievement.
A lyrical, lovely display of Updike’s protean powers.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-95715-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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