Katie Roiphe's Sex Essay

This morning I opened my New York Times (after digging around in the snow for ten minutes, in my bathrobe, in a blizzard) to find an annoying essay by Katie Roiphe about "Great Male Writers" and their sex scenes. Her thesis: the old guys were exuberant and sexy, but the news guys are wimpy and ambivalent about sex, presumably because they're all feminist and sensitive and whatever.

What's annoying about it is that she chose to write about only those writers who fit her thesis. The new guys in the essay are Chabon, Wallace, Eggers, Franzen, and someone named Benjamin Kunkel, whom, I'm embarrassed to admit, I've never even heard of. But there are many writers who are just as prominent, just as well-reviewed, who don't fit her thesis at all. Junot Diaz comes to mind, and George Saunders, Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Powers, Denis Johnson. Chabon, Franzen, et al, are doing a particular self-conscious thing, yeah. But they're not really representative of "Our Great Male Writers" -- just a subset. Four guys whose subject, unlike the guys in the previous generation, isn't really sex at all.

The NYTimes is still a great paper, even after Judith Miller and Jayson Blair and all that, but they're obsessed with noting "cultural trends." Hand-picking your examples to make a vague semi-truth is just bad journalism.

However, the most intriguing thing about the essay is this: on my paper version of the article, the main graphic has a little picture of Dave Eggers under the wimpiest sex: "Cuddling." The internet version has Kunkel. Did they just not have room for both, so they picked one for the paper, one for the digital? Or did Eggers call up in a rage and demand his picture be taken off? I dearly hope it was the latter.

Updike's "The Full Glass"

I was reading the New Yorker this afternoon and suddenly got the crazy idea that I should actually read the new Updike story. Don't get me wrong--I like Updike. But the Updike I like is the Updike of book reviews, incidental (and highly erudite) essays, the Henry Bech stories, and Of The Farm. That's about it. I tried the first Rabbit book three times and got hung up in the same place every go-round: when women first appear.

That's the thing I don't like about Updike, when I don't like Updike. I've never read a memorable woman character in his stuff. They might be in there--I've hardly been through the whole oeurve--but by and large, they are not his forte.

This new story looked pretty good to me at first--an old man is taking his ritual drink of water one evening, and he reflects upon the concept of fullness--the times in his life when he has felt full. He begins with memories of water itself, and these are interesting, and seem to be leading up to something.

And then the something comes--it's an affair!

I certainly don't object to this topic in fiction. It's a common life experience, I suppose. But when Updike does it, it's always with this sense...not of privilege, exactly, but of inevitability. His characters talk about their affairs as though having an affair is an expected, even required, rite of passage in a man's life; there are always some earthy and poetic little riffs about fuckin'; and the women--both the mistress and the wife, who here is always referred to as "the wife"--are boring as shit, and ultimately pathetic.

And this "the wife" thing. Updike's narrator is an asshole--we're not supposed to love the guy--but the defiant way he weilds his little slights is terribly precious, and it bugs me how much Updike enjoys making his flawed men coddle their masculine foibles. When Philip Roth does philandering, it's big, wild, funny, creepy, and explosive. When Updike does it, it's masturbatory and redundant.

I guess what I'm complaining about, ultimately, is the way Updike's characters are men and women first, human beings second. I find this approach tiresome. The gender wars were over before he even started growing hair in his ears--can he find a new hobby horse already? When Updike doesn't have sex on his mind, he's as good as they come; when he does, he's the worst. I can't think of another writer like this, whose attention to a single topic so completely saps his usual artistic vitality.