Reviewing a new edition of John Updike’s short stories, Scott Dill praises the late writer’s attention to the surface of things:
What shines so pervasively in his short stories is the ability to burnish everyday routines with those carefully chosen adjectives. He may not convince us with weighty theology, but he does give us a grammar for praise. When our sins harden us to God’s goodness, Updike not only reminds us of it, but he surprises us with specific gifts, faithfully retrieving them for us to taste and see. In these stories, the famous chronicler of adulterous affairs (twice profiled on the cover of the magazine Time) appears less as a lascivious provocateur than as a patient archeologist, polishing each fragment of human desire for our inspection. True, several stories explore the moral failings of marriages gone awry while simultaneously celebrating infidelity’s sexual pleasures. Yet this is a function of what we might call, with all due respect, Updike’s shallowness. In one of the adulterous stories a man tells his lover, as he ends their affair, “For me it was wonderful to become a partner in your response to textures. Your shallowness, as my wife calls it [ … ] broke a new dimension into my hitherto inadequately superficial world.” When I was recently asked if I could justify having students read Updike’s sensual descriptions, I should have responded that such shallow sensuality would do them good.
The Dish 