A year ago I devoted a post to the name "Myron Kriegman". Just for the heck of it, because it is the middle of August and a time traditionally devoted to something less than full seriousness, I will reproduce that post here. The illustration, of a random mnemonic device, is new for this year. -------------------------------------------------------- Myron Kriegman ! I had a moment recently in which I had been blocked looking for the name for a certain character in the John Updike novel ROGER'S VERSION (1986). Now I am determined not only to remember the name but to make it the subject of a blog post. So ... here it is! I no longer have the book around: I may have donated it to a library at some point in recent years. The novel turns largely on a three-way argument over God and the worshipper: whether there is a God and whether that question can be answered by reason or requires faith. Kriegman occupies the "no to God -- and yes to ...
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Myron Kriegman ! I had a moment recently in which I had been blocked looking for the name for a certain character in the John Updike novel ROGER'S VERSION (1986). Now I am determined not only to remember the name but to make it the subject of a blog post. So ... here it is! I no longer have the book around: I may have donated it to a library at some point in recent years. The novel turns largely on a three-way argument over God and the worshipper: whether there is a God and whether that question can be answered by reason or requires faith. Kriegman occupies the "no to God -- and yes to reason" position in the triangle. The titular Roger (last name Lambert, although we are supposed to connect this to Roger Chillingworth, from Hawthorne) occupies the "yes to God -- and no to reason" PoV. Roger sees himself as a follower of Karl Barth in believing in a hidden God, who cannot be reached by human ratiocinations. The third character in the triangle is Dale,...
What was the best novel, written by a US based author in English in the years 1980 to 2000, the final fifth of the 20th century? Someone asked me that question recently on an online forum and I came up with three quite offhand, but I'm open to suggestions: My off-the-cuff three: Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) . Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998).
My recent reading includes a biography of one of my favorite novelists, John Updike, written by Adam Begley, former books editor for The New York Observer. Quite incidentally, I see that one of the blurbs on the dust jacket comes from Janet Malcolm, another author I'm sure I've mentioned in this blog or its precursor. Malcolm is known for In the Freud Archives and for her take on the Jeffrey MacDonald case. This is what she has to say about Begley's book, "He has rendered a portrait of the writer that shimmers with truth. This is literary biography at its highest level of excellence." I wondered when I first picked the book up how long it would take Begley to mention the theologian Karl Barth, who haunts so many of Updike's works. The index indicates Barth is mentioned just five times, a modest number IMHO. The first time at p. 223, and it is in the form of a direct quote from his subject. In order to give himself relief from an "oppressive blanke...
Two new books about narcissism are getting some play in the press of late. Jeffrey Kluger's THE NARCISSIST NEXT DOOR comes to us from Riverhead Books. The other, THE AMERICANIZATION OF NARCISSISM by Elizabeth Lunbeck, hails from Harvard Un. Press. Kluger, a science writer with TIME, wants to warn and forearm readers about the potential "monsters" in their own lives -- families, workplaces, neighborhoods. He also invokes such pop-cult examples as Donald Trump, who he says has the "insatiable hunger to be the largest, loudest, most honkingly conspicuous presence in any room." Lunbeck. a professor of history at Vanderbilt, seems to want to take Christopher Lasch down a peg. It was Lasch who wrote THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM (1979), and Lunbeck says that Lasch's treatment of the term has made narcissism a cliché, "a highfalutin name for the old-fashioned complaint that modernity means a loosening of restraint." I'm looking at this moment at a...
The following comes from the recent biography of the great novelist, John Updike, written by Adam Begley: Among the other twentieth-century American writers who made a splash before their thirtieth birthday (the list includes Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon), none piled up accomplishments in as orderly a fashion as Updike, or with as little fuss....He wasn't despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn't alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one. In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers. even his neuroses were tame.