Updike

Reviews / Votes

William Pritchard has written an intelligent, eloquently argued and highly persuasive study of John Updike's monumental oeuvre. Mr. Pritchard is both sympathetic and critical: his reading of Updike is intimate, knowing, and judicious. - Joyce Carol Oates ""Updike could hardly have had a more able champion. Updike: America's Man of Letters is accessible, balanced, open-minded, free of lit-crit babble and filled with nuanced insight. Drawing on wide learning and extraordinary good sense, Pritchard shows how time and again Updike's critics have simply closed their eyes to the subtleties of the page.... His conclusion - that Updike is 'never less than an interesting writer, and at his best a major one' - is not self-evident but hard-earned indeed. John Updike should be grateful for the intelligence and even-handed justice of this assessment. And so should we."" - Newsday ""A valuable, quietly passionate work. By examining every genre of Updike's writing - fiction, criticism, memoirs, poetry - comprehensively, keenly, in a style free of academic jargon, Pritchard amply demonstrates Updike's fearsome articulateness, at all moments, on all subjects, in all forms'; his extraordinary writerly gift of transforming 'homely' materials (what Updike characterized as 'the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America') 'into radiance'; and his place beside William Dean Howells and Edmund Wilson as a critic 'committed to speaking with conviction, wit, and authority about the intellectual and moral condition of his native land,' who relies on 'nothing more than a cultivated intelligence and assiduous reading.'"" - Atlantic Monthly ""If you are serious, you could do a great deal worse than starting off with this extraordinarily nourishing, insightful and readable book by Pritchard - a shining example of commonsense criticism and of the importance of enduringly serious writing."" - Baltimore Sun