Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticisms by John Updike

By John Updike

Book Overview

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Hugging the Shore is an enormously intelligent, witty collection of essays by John Updike. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist sheds keen light on everything from the first kiss to going barefoot to the world's greatest writers. First time in paper.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394724976
• ISBN13: 9780394724973
• Release Date: October 1984
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 919 Pages
• Weight: 2.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 3.1" x 5.5" x 2.5"

Customer Reviews

Hugging the Shore

In John Updike's collection of essays and criticism, Hugging the Shore, it takes the author until page six to delve into the varied wonders of the female sex organ. I am unsure whether this is a record for Updike, but knowing his work as I do, I suggest not. Still, sex, wit, clarity, insight, cleverness and a tendency towards dazzling prose tell us all - Here is John Updike. The collection begins, to my mind, very weakly indeed. The first seventy pages are scattered pieces of writing that are neither essay nor story, review nor criticism. One twenty page section is simply interviews, with such non-entities as the Golf Course Owner and the Undertaker. A brief piece on book envelopes taking over the world is bizarre, and one wonders whether the rest of the collection will come across as the droppings of a writer accustomed to seeing his work in print. Happily, this is not the case. Updike's reviews, while predominantly of Americans and absolutely focused on an American, Protestant outlook, are conversational and enjoyable, while also possessing great intelligence and creativity. He is unafraid to sprinkle his writing with metaphors and smilies and other tricks of the author's trade, allowing his reviews the sprightliness of prose and side-stepping the possibility of churning out tired, staid non-fiction. On Charles Citrine, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift, '...the sleep of his soul, as he thinks of it, is disturbed but not shattered. He rolls over, amid the rumpled sheets and untied threads of the plot.' This is wonderful writing, imagery which could easily find itself nestled within the cosy bosom of an Updike short story. Because the fiction ranges from roughly the early to late 1970s, and because John Updike has reviewed a great many books by the same authors, collected together by theme (if there are multiple authors considered) or the writer's name (if only one), we are able to watch the rise, or fall, or Updike's opinion of their writing. Of Anne Tyler's writing he is very impressed, until perhaps about 1980 when he begins to realise that the quality of her work has plateaued, and does not seem likely to increase. Iris Murdoch is at first warily appreciated, then wearily disliked, while the French nouveau roman authors are, for the most part, technically applauded while simultaneously derided for their lack of humanity or relevance. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the collection for me was the hundred and fifty or so pages in the first half which focused on the letters and journals of some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century - Nabokov, Edmun Wilson, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka. Perhaps because of his own knowledge of writing and the writer's life, Updike brings to his analysis of these works a tender, indulgent understanding of the difficulties and the pleasures of being a writer. Updike is of course was nothing like Hemingway, who boasted of killing men and lions, and who drank and drank an

The true American man- of - letters

Updike 's great fictional output is accompanied by hundreds of occasional pieces he has written through the years. He defines the difference between the two kinds this way. "Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.'' So for him the non- fictional pieces are the less -adventurous ones, the ones in which one must stay closer to the world of fact and observation. Nonetheless in these pieces he almost invariably brings his great intelligence and aesthetic sense into play in addressing a tremendously wide variety of subjects.

What Updike Does Best

I've always felt that Updike is better as a critic and essayist than as a fiction writer; not that he isn't superb at both, but the fiction is (sometimes) too smooth, paradoxically too well-written. Updike's striking insights (Doris Day as an American Pelagian) and widely ranging topics make this collection worth reading again and again.

You'll read parts of it again and again. Superb!

From a brilliant essay on Melville to great book reviews to presenting the works of other writers (such as Yevtushenko), this volume is entertaining, enlightening, and wonderful.