The Web is afire with tributes to Wallace; several hark back to the blogger's encounter with the novelist at a reading and how he or she was like a lover spurned because of something Wallace said or didn't say, did or didn't do. He inspired, and dreaded, that sort of reaction. Many emphasize he was their favorite living writer, quickly followed by, "and I'm sure that's true of so many others."
But there is one person, I think, yet to be heard from: John Updike, whose sci-fi novel Toward the End of Time and career in general was taken down many pegs by Wallace in 1998 in a piece that used the deadliest tone: disappointed admiration. (Plus occasional savagery. The line I remembered for a decade, "Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?" is, to be fair, quoted from an anonymous friend of Wallace's. Not that he disputes the point.)
Anyway, no one would have thought Updike would outlive Wallace, but he's still here, publishing a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, which was a much much better book than Toward the End of Time although the same will not be said of this new volume, The Widows of Eastwick. In it, Updike makes his now-familiar complaint:
"... print doesn't mean to people what it used to, it may be. A considerable number get what news they need off the internet. They don't need much. Sports, celebrities. For self-advertisement there's all this blogging. It's amazing to me that anyone has time to read such crap, but I guess they do."
That'll make him the toast of the blogosphere!
Curiously, Wallace was also a happy luddite: he had very mixed feelings toward TV, and only looked at his email once a week. Go beyond the pop culture affect and he was nearly as retro as Updike. This adds yet another bitter note to his suicide; for all his criticism of what he called the GMN, for Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, Updike), he, their heir, paid much more attention than the other writers of his generation did.
"What exactly was the whole big Roth hysteria?" he wrote me once. "I'm way behind on my Roth, admittedly. I still reread Portnoy's Complaint, but I flagged in the middle of one of the Zuckerman books and now am like 8 novels behind. The same thing happens to me with Mailer."
Can we get a graduate student to work on Humor in Portnoy and Infinite Jest? Thanks.
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