Customer Reviews

Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

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Heft this book in your hand (and recall that he produced several more volumes of nearly this bulk) to appreciate Updike's productivity as a literary and cultural critic and shrewd, minute observer of contemporary and historic scenery.

For me, Updike's greatness lies not so much in his skill as a novelist as in his essays, which reveal the depth and breadth of his personal interests in easy, droll, delightful prose. Dip into this collection anywhere and find brief or extended bursts of his erudition and his ability to deal interestingly with topics fresh or worn.

Example: His review of the 2-volume collected diaries of Tolstoy (a chronic melancholic who dwelt constantly on his own shortcomings); the writer's perseveration and the collection itself are panned, but in an easy, rambling 14 pages that wittily convey much about Tolstoy's career, misogyny, self-criticism, long life and achievements.

Example: In the first of four short, genial appreciations of John Cheever, he writes, "He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such poignance the weary commuter's nightly tumble back into the arms of his family." This is marvelous characterization of a writer who in many ways was Updike's twin in chronicling that post-war American era of domestic life resumed, with its delight in, mismanagement of, and eventual boredom with success, power, and love.

This and the other volumes of essays are wonderful books to have at hand for casual reading and discovery. Updike wrote knowledgeably about the literature of and before his time, and his essays will be valued by any student of the second half of the literary 20th century. Here is a master essayist and thinker who rarely fails to entertain and inform.

It's a shame that these earlier essays by Updike have gone out of print. Perceived in the same graceful style of his most famous essay collection, Hugging the Shore, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the readings in Picked Up Pieces are no less startling in their breathtaking insights and sympathetic readings of a wide range of authors and their works. Updike is so at ease with all aspects of the language and the culture that reading him is like a guided tour into the greatest pleasure and deepest instincts of the the literary terrain of the time. Highly recommended, and a vote to reprint these essays for our own time.

It's a shame that these earlier essays by Updike have gone out of print. Perceived in the same graceful style of his most famous essay collection, Hugging the Shore, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the readings in Picked Up Pieces are no less startling in their breathtaking insights and sympathetic readings of a wide range of authors and their works. Updike is so at ease with all aspects of the language and the culture that reading him is like a guided tour into the greatest pleasure and deepest instincts of the the literary terrain of the time. Highly recommended, and a vote to reprint these essays for our own time.