BOOKS
NEVER ON SUNDAY
A MONTH OF SUNDAYS.
8yJohn Updike. Alfred A. Knopf. $6.95.
The surface of Mr. Updike's writing twitches and quivers inces·
santly, never
more
so than in this new novel about a faintly hedonist minister
"with doubts ." By
some
process of intellection that is foreign to me this prose
tic has been critically taken to
be
a sublime style; the disparaging word, as it
were, is rare to
come
by apropos
Me.
Updike's work. When it is discovered it
manifests itself as no
more
than a slight reservation . I don't know why this
should
be
so . Mr. Updike has all the grievous faults of an Oscar Wilde up–
dated to include contemporary paraphernalia, speech, etc., but none of these
things can disguise the purple blush that
suffuses
the work.
It
is,
if
I may use
such a word, unachieved,
i.e.,
its fancy images are not in touch with the world
but emblazon it . The writing is what is in some quarters known as' 'vivid ."
We played in each other like children in puddles.
Me.
Updike writes. Why not "mud" instead of puddles? Or "dogs" instead
of children? Or anything at all for that matter? When the aim is "vivid"
writing, it
seems
that anything goes as long as.the surface dances.
The work buckles and falls apart time after
time
under the weight of this
concatenation of images, often linked together by comparisons that work to
conceal the reality they are supposedly revealing.
. . . newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot
like urine from a cow's vulva.
Mr. Updike has many
more
tricks in his book, one ofthem the disfiguring and
falsifying one of anthropomorphizing anything that threatens to escape the
net of his ego .
