Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (First Edition)

To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.

An amazingly prolific man of letters, Updike serves up a feast in this massive compilation of essays, speeches, prefaces, a playlet and dozens of book reviews, the latter of which make up the bulk of the book. In conversational, urbane, witty prose he offers a dizzying smorgasbord of opinions on baseball, pop music, architecture, national monuments, the Gospel of St. Matthew, Ben Franklin, Mozart's music (it "gives us permission to live") and the modern artist as courter of risk and danger. While his portrayal of women as "reasonable and right" non-protesters, a trait he implies is biogenic, smacks of male chauvinism, he is more enlightening in discussing Eros and men's mythologizing of women's bodies. Along with appreciations of Edmund Wilson ("a paragon of intellectual energy and curiosity") and John Cheever, there are travel pieces ranging from Finland to dysfunctional New York City. Whatever the topic, Updike never fails to offer a perspicacious comment and fresh observation. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like its predecessors, Picked-Up Pieces (1975) and Hugging the Shore (1983), the title and author's introduction here again have Updike minimizing his critical exercises--while, at 928 pages, neglecting the reiteration of nary a one. As Updike ages and his eminence grows, there is a clear shift, though, in the focus of his nonfiction labors. Fewer book reviews, less polymathic curiosity; more speeches, long essays, a writer at the top of the heap legitimately looking more down than around. There's a kind of literary-autobiographical stock-taking secreted in three separate appreciations of John Cheever; as well as one in the book's finest extended essay, ``How Does the Writer Imagine?,'' and a related essay, ``Should Writers Give Lectures?'' By now case-by-case books appear to interest Updike less than careers, a whole literary corpus; and thus he is especially revealing about Kafka, Melville, Calvino, and Roth (though about Roth, as well as Malamud, Updike remains flummoxed by and unable to quite understand Jewish identity in the absence of Christian-type assent). There are superb smaller pieces too--on Robert Pinget, on Russian glasnost-era novels, on Bruce Chatwin, on Vargas Llosa. Updike's approvals and demurrers are never predictable, and this gives a fine pliability to his whole critical enterprise--only helped by his never-less-than- excellent prose. A necessary pleasure. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is Updike's fourth collection of nonfiction, or "odd literary jobs," as he calls them: "the prefaces and puffs, the 'few paragraphs' on beauty or baseball--that a persevering writer, aging into a shaky celebrity, gets increasingly asked to do." There are short notices, a travel piece, and occasional pieces on assigned topics like fiction, women, national monuments, popular music, New York architecture, being on TV, and speeches. But mostly there are essays and reviews, a few on science or technical topics, but generally literary: from tributes to Edmund Wilson and John Cheever, to reflections on Matthew's Gospel or the criticism of Q.D. Leavis, to reviews of Roth, Murdoch, Shaw, Ecco, and many others. An appendix of comments on his own works ends the book. Everything, as we've come to expect, is very well and wittily handled, with broad, sometimes surprising knowledge and insights--perhaps precious and New York -ish at times, perhaps the work of one who can "write term papers for pay instead of grades," but clearly superior literary journalism. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.