- Description
An appreciation of John Updike with Adam Gopnik
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ShalomFreedman 02/06/2009 02:31 AM Report
I would like to thank Charlie Rose for the two shows on John Updike. Adam Gopnik's appreciation provides real insight into Updike's special place as chronicler of American reality, but I most enjoyed seeing and hearing Updike himself answer Charlie Rose's most interesting questions. I have read a great deal of Updike but did not exactly understand where Updike stood religiously. Updike is sensible and balanced, and of enormous intelligence. The whole manner of his discourse in these interviews is a delight to watch and hear. His telling secrets of the craft, for instance the way he in creating a character and inhabiting it is able to understand the world in ways he would not have had he seen through his eyes only- is illuminating. Updike stood for certain values, including diligence in work and as a craftsman, loyalty to the world from which he came , love of the beautiful, translating of Reality into words- which are 'eternal'. Certainly one of the great American writers of the second- half of the twentieth century he personally belied the old adage- "that in the lives of American writers there are no second acts." In fact he was true to himself and his work through a long productive, fullfilling, and richly creative career.
These wonderful interviews do not come as substitute for reading Updike but rather as rich enhancement of it.
hyperbolus 02/05/2009 05:37 PM Report
Judeo-American bourgeois critic/ideologue Adam Gopnik attempts, in reactionary/neo-conservative fashion, to replace Marx and Freud with Lincoln(!) and Darwin, calling (liberal) democracy (sic) and science the twin pillars of "our" modern/liberal society, conveniently ignoring the capitalist ground underlying/defining/determining these ideological pillars. He then goes on to praise Updike the Great (middling/middle class) American Novelist. Classic/priceless/too good to be true!
doodahdaze 02/05/2009 03:11 PM Report
I'm glad Charlie Rose changed the subject, because I thought this guy was going to go on and on about some magical land, where colorful fruitcake ferries could prance about on the beach and sing Abba songs at the top of their lungs and everybody would be "happy" liberal Democrats and everything would "evolve" around them because they "embrace" Darwin and as such, are his chosen people; and on and on and on...