Day Two in Paris, by Darin Strauss

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Last night I read to a nice crowd at Shakespeare and Co. Then a bunch of writers and I (Jonathan Safran Foer, the poets Joshua Beckman and Matthew Roher) had dinner at a bistro near Notre Dame with Sylvia, owner of Shakespeare and Co and the daughter of its founder, a guy who used to hang with all the famous Beats. The night felt very Parisian - public reading, bistro, famous writers -- and was the first time I can say that I felt at all like Hemingway. (Not that I'm claining - are you listening crazy blog people? - not that I'm claiming to be anywhere near as good as Hemingway.... Though I do have a certain macho appeal, especially when my back isn't hurting and if I've avoided dairy, which can make me gassy.)

Anyway, I've been reading Updike a lot since he died, and am reading him now. (Of The Farm.) It's weird to feel the need to defend a guy whose career saw the abundant successes and lotto-size returns that Updike's did. But it's weird, too, what's happened to our bard of suburbia; why is it that so many younger writers don't groove on Updike?

Not too long ago, Nicholson Baker came out with U and I, a book about Updike's "omnipresence and best-selling popularity." The challenge, Baker told us, would be "to write about Updike while people could still conceivably sneer at him simply for being at the top of the heap, before any false valedictory grand-old-man reverence crept in, as it inevitably would." Well, Nicholson, it hasn't. John Updike has not gotten the G.O.M.R.T (Grand Old Man Reverence Treatment), even after he died; he's gotten ignored. Writers have turned their noses up at him.

But how many novelists could write a sentence as brain-sparking as a good Updikeian three-clauser? As a pure sentence-writer, he ranks behind only Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (and just above Foster Wallace and Lorrie Moore) among all American writers of the 20^th century, I think.

Here's one, picked at random, from Of The Farm, one of JU's lesser efforts, but still pretty great:

The sight of her bare feet, the toenails painted, flat on the earth and caked to the ankles like the feet of a child or a gypsy moved me; desire must have emanated from me as an odor or a wave of heat, for she cringed, embarrassed, and I realized I had exposed her......

I'll leave you with that.

Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You, family, drama, doctor, accident, literary, Penguin Books, books