{"id":6615,"date":"2025-04-06T09:22:52","date_gmt":"2025-04-06T14:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6615"},"modified":"2025-04-06T09:22:52","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T14:22:52","slug":"updike-mentioned-in-review-of-diana-evans-essay-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/04\/06\/updike-mentioned-in-review-of-diana-evans-essay-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:<\/p>\n

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It\u2019s a delicious counterpoint to Evans\u2019s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples<\/em> with influencing Ordinary People<\/em>, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples<\/em> that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other\u2019s fingertips?'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations.\u00a0In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence: “Thinking about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,53,35,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular","category-reviews","category-updike-in-context","category-updike-quoted","category-updikes-life-times"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6617,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6615\/revisions\/6617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}