by John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf (Random House) 1997

First sentence: First snow: it came this year late in November.

A great read if: you live in the city and fucking hate yourself
Method of selection: Wanted to trash John Updike

I’m so glad John Updike is dead, because now we don’t have to keep pretending we like him. And I’m going to stop pretending by actually liking this. I was convinced this would be shitty. Usually a book that starts by describing freshly fallen snow is going nowhere, and the mini-story of the mystical FedEx envelope that appears, mystically, at the door only furthered my shitty resolve. But as it so happens, on the morning I pulled this from the shelf I lived in the city and fucking hated myself, so it’s a great read. Updike gives us gems like, “Plastic shovels are an improvement — can you believe it? The world does not only get worse.” And this (from page four, which I made it to), “By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams’ truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.”

Things get even more exciting when you check the summary on the front flap: “A recent war between the United States and China has thinned the population and brought social chaos. The dollar has been locally replaced by Massachusetts scrip; instead of taxes, one pays protection money to competing racketeers.” This sounds like a conservative Republican’s wet dream. There was, however, nothing about this plotline in the first three pages, and I wonder if the publisher mixed John Updike up with Jon Updam, the famous author of such post-apocalyptic fiction as Regnar’s Fortress and The Last Dairy Producer.

The point is, I would take this one home, and did. Score one for the New York Times book reviewers, eight hundred million billion for shitty books.

Other reviews: Bookmunch, Damian Kelleher

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