Updike's Easy Terrorist

I'm reading John Updike's Terrorist at the moment, as sort of background reading for the dissertation. There are blurbs all over it saying how great it is, the Mail on Sunday says how "masterly" the prose is, and Ian McEwan saying how he's "the finest novelist writing in English today" and John Banville saying "no one else I know of, simply no one, writes this well" and the publisher's own blurb saying how Updike is "America's foremost writer on the times we live in". It's all so gushy, gushy, gushy.

And when you start reading it, you get this calm feeling, you imagine a sea and a little breeze, maybe you're on a beach and you have a little drink next to you, and every now and again you put down the book, open still but face down on your tummy, and look out to the sea and watch people swimming and people in little boats. Because it's all so easy, this book, it's like Updike wrote it whilst half-asleep. Every word seems to be there so perfectly, like he imagined the whole thing in one go and it just appeared on the page, without any thought or anything, without any crises or deletions or redrafts or shifts from the first to the third person and then back again. It's sleepwalking literature masquerading as edgy and contemporary. There's no questioning in this, no doubt or anything, not of literature's ability to portray things, not of his own ability, not of anything - there are no problems here for Updike, this book was probably a breeze to write. Come to think of it, he probably wrote it sitting on a lounger on a beach every now and again putting his notebook down to look out at the sea to watch people swimming and people in little boats.