The New Yorker & Me blog featured a post on September 11, 2015 titled “In Praise of John Updike’s Criticism (Contra James Wood).” The blogger takes exception with Woods’ assessment of Updike’s criticism, which surfaces in a Slate interview (18 August 2015) with Isaac Chotiner.

Chotiner complains, “I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about,” and Wood piles on:

“The maddening equilibrium of [Updike’s] critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything would be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put on the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself.”

This blogger responds, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.”

As “an offset against Wood’s sour remarks” the blogger quotes a passage from an Orhan Pamuk review of Adam Begley’s recent biography and also cites a dozen favorite and memorable passages from Updike’s criticism to prove that Updike’s reviews, like his fiction and poetry, was full of insights, as well as his omnipresent appreciation for language itself. Photo credit: Tom Bachtell.