Hugging the Shore

Résumé du livre

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea," John Updike writes in his foreword to this collection of mostly literary considerations. Since 1960 the novelist and poet has been reviewing books for The New Yorker, and the reviews of the last eight years make up the bulk of this volume. When Picked-Up Pieces, his last such round-up, was published, Joyce Carol Oates called it "an irresistibly readable collection of reviews, critical and autobiographical essays, and interviews," and John Cheever spoke of "Updike's extraordinary radiance." Even his fellow critics have been encouraging: George Steiner has written of Updike's "unforgiving yet strangely solicitous, almost tender intelligence"; Richard Locke has claimed "there is an immensely attractive, nonacademic attentiveness to his reviews"; and James Atlas has complimented the article on Melville included here as "the sort of ambitious scholarly reappraisal not seen in this country since the death of Edmund Wilson." Wilson, indeed, is one of the authors of Hugging the Shore teats with special attentiveness and affection; others are Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan, and Roland Barthes. But fond applause is also bestowed on movie actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and on golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer. As a literary critic Mr. Updike ranges through no only American and European fiction but also African and Oriental authors and studies in art, anthropology, and theology. The voyage ends in the snug harbour of the author's comments upon his own works and begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of imaginary interviews, short fiction, humorous pieces, and essays." --