And we start the new year with an interesting post:  a book critic (Leo Robson, The Guardian) reviewing a book critic (Craig Raine, and also James Walcott) who’s reviewing Updike’s book and art criticism, among other things.

In “More Dynamite: Essays 1990-2012 by Craig Raine—review,” posted on The Guardian online on Friday, December 27, 2013, Robson notes of both the main title reviewed and Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs that “the only writer given extensive treatment in both these books is Updike.

“Wolcott praises the ‘deft, polite scalpeling’ Updike performs on Saul Bellow (he peels away the ‘rugged prettiness’ to locate an ‘agitated sluggishness’), and his capacity to ‘dig beneath the hype and confetti of a book’s reception’ (in this case, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). But he also notes a ‘lack of heat and force,’ exactly the qualities Wolcott himself aims for and attains, and calls for more ‘plainspokenness, even a whiff of woodsmoke from the old slash-and-burn,’ just as Raine, writing about Updike’s essay on Andrew Wyeth, complains that at a certain point he ‘caves in,’ and dismisses as ‘ludicrously indulgent’ Updike’s comparison of Fairfield Porter to Matisse and Piero della Francesca.

“Updike stands as an object of worship to both Raine and Wolcott, a model of what can be done, except on those occasions when magnanimity limits honesty—cardinal virtue of any critic.”