Updike Admits Breaking Updike's Rules for Reviewing

Some time ago, Freeman posted John Updike's Rules for Reviewing, which are wise and wonderful, and which we think all critics would do well to follow. Including Updike himself. But it turns out -- not surprisingly -- that even rulemakers sometimes break the rules.

In a recent profile, Updike talked about a review he wrote for the New Yorker where he belittled Tom Wolfe's novel, "A Man in Full," calling it mere "entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." (This was a widely loved book that even Michiko liked -- well, mostly -- pointing to its "dazzling, funny, wrenching set pieces, all rendered in his exclamatory, adrenaline-laced prose.") Now Updike admits, when he wrote that review, he broke his own rules, including what may just be the cardinal rule: Thou Shalt Not Review the Books of Enemies (or, as Updike put it: "Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike").

Check it out:

"Conceding that he should have read Wolfe's much-better first novel ('Bonfire of the Vanities') before knocking his second ('A Man in Full') in a review, Updike demurely copped to Wolfe's subsequent charge that he, Updike, was a 'navel-gazing' novelist, wrapped up in his own life ... Updike offered an additional admission of his own tangled motives in the case. He had never quite forgiven Wolfe, he said, for a biting parodic 'travesty' Wolfe wrote of the New Yorker and the magazine's former, famously shy editor, William Shawn. (Updike has been a New Yorker contributor for more than half a century.) 'I think some distressed homunculus inside me,' Updike said with a summary, ironic twinkle, 'couldn't be prevented from attacking this, in its way, excellent book ('A Man in Full')."

In response to Updike's review, Wolfe retaliated with characteristic flare, dubbing Updike one of the "three stooges," (the other two were John Irving and Normal Mailer). To this day, 8 years later, it looks like Wolfe is still needling him: the first of many blurbs on Wolfe's webpage for "A Man in Full" comes from Updike's infamous review:

"A book that defies you not to buy it." -- John Updike, The New Yorker

(Thanks for the link tip, Mark!)