“Certainly the End…” |

I don't know if John Updike ever went to therapy, but if he did, reading "Certainly the End…" would've saved him some time and money. Though ostensibly a critique of Updike's novel, Wallace's review operates kind of as an attempt to help Updike work out his problems. After all, "Updike has always written mainly about himself, and … he's been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death." So at the end, when Wallace says, "It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason [Ben Turnbull is] so unhappy is that he's an asshole," we understand that he's also talking about Updike.

I like how at first Wallace distances himself from his contemporaries because of their attacks ("Just a penis with a thesaurus") on Updike the Man, as opposed to Updike the Author. But then he proceeds to break down the distance between the man and his work, and ultimately comes to a similar conclusion ("[The protagonist] persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. And [the] author … believes it too").

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The only thing I've read by John Updike is "A&P", which I'm pretty sure we all had to read in high school at some point, and about which I don't remember much. But I've never felt the urge to tackle any of his books, mostly because of a vague memory of some ignorant right-wing comment he made about the Iraq War (what he said and where he said it, I can't quite recall, it was years ago, sorry), and his stupid (to me) book titles (Rabbit Run; Rabbit Redux, and so on). Not necessarily the best reasons to avoid someone's oeuvre, but considering the multitude of books not written by Updike that I have yet to read, good enough for now.

It's a weird thing, when you factor someone's personal life/politics into your decision of whether or not to view/read/whatever their art. Where's the line? What does the line mean? Take someone like Roman Polanski. I liked Chinatown. Same with Rosemary's Baby. How do you let your view of the man relate to the man's art? Is it enough to say "This is a bad guy who made a good film"? Do you buy a ticket to his newest movie? What about someone like Michael Jackson? Or Wagner? He was a Nazi. You going to play that at your wedding? Obviously, I took extreme examples in this paragraph, as opposed to people with say unpleasant personalities or views I disagree with. So there are varying degrees to this, but the questions still stand.

On a somewhat similar note, check out this short excerpt from an interview with Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show, during which Mailer does not make any friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw. Although, this kind of makes me want to read something by Norman Mailer.

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