My official word on John Updike: he's a great writer, but not a good storyteller.It bugged me throughout even if Rabbit did seem real or not, I simply didn't believe Updike. And then a few days ago, via Sully I may have the answer:
Harold Bloom once snarkily quipped that John Updike was “a minor novelist with a major style.” After reading Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, Daniel Ross Goodman seems to agree, noting the writer’s “lack of intense passion.” He speculates the deficit “was because Updike did not experience the deep suffering of many other literary geniuses”...Updike’s literary setbacks were those of a lottery winner who stubs his toe on the way to the bank and then has to wait in line before he can cash his check.Maybe it's not fair to judge another's trials, and I'm probably the only person I know that doesn't like Updike, but I certainly sensed the above as I was reading him.
Also, the lottery bit makes me laugh, thinking of someone's breakdown of why George Harrison was always so grouchy:
Finally, the film really never investigates the real mystery of Harrison: What was he so morose about?...Harrison has always had a sense of the aggrieved about him. I just don't know what the source of it was. In Harrison's mini-autobiography at the front of I Me Mine, the unasked-for collection of his song lyrics, he seems mostly unhappy about … the travel indignities he suffered during the Beatles years.
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