"Bruce Sterling - Updike's Version" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
CATSCAN 3 "Updike's Version"

John Updike has got to be the epitome of
everything that SF readers love to hate. Those slim,
clever, etiolated mainstream novels about well-to-do
_New Yorker_ subscribers, who sip white wine and
contemplate adultery . . . Novels stuffed like
Christmas geese with hi-falutin' literary values . . .
Mention Updike at a SFWA gig, and you get yawns,
shudders, shakings of the head . . His work affects
science fiction writers like cayenne pepper affects a
pack of bloodhounds.
Why? Because John Updike has everything SF
writers don't. He is, in some very real sense,
everything SF writers aren't.
Certain qualities exist, that novelists are
popularly supposed to possess. Gifts, abilities, that
win An Author respect, that cause folks to back off
and gape just a bit if they find one in a grocery
line. Qualities like: insight into modern culture. A
broad sympathy for the manifold quirks of human
nature. A sharp eye for the defining detail. A quick
ear for language. A mastery of prose.
John Updike possesses these things. He is
erudite. He has, for instance, actually read Isak
Dinesen, Wallace Stevens, Ciline, Jean Rhys, Gunter
Grass, Nabokov and Bellow. Not only has he read these
obscure and intimidating people, but he has publicly
discussed the experience with every sign of genuine
enjoyment.
Updike is also enormously clever, clever to a
point that approaches genius through the sheer
irrepressible business of its dexterity. Updike's
paragraphs are so brittle, so neatly nested in their
comma'ed clauses, that they seem to burst under the
impact of the reader's gaze, like hyper-flaky
croissants.
Updike sees how things look, notices how people
dress, hears how people talk. His eye for the telling
detail can make even golf and birdwatching, the
ultimate yawnable whitebread Anglo pastimes, more or
less interesting. (Okay--not very interesting,
granted. But interesting for the sheer grace of
Updike's narrative technique. Like

watching Fred
Astaire take out the garbage.)
It would be enlightening to compare John Updike