Reviews for Just looking

The average rating for Just looking based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-12 00:00:00 Tonje Fallan Isaksen My third date with John Updike. And for the third time in a row he's irritated me a good deal more than he's charmed me. There's no question he can write. But so much of what he writes about holds little interest to me. He's a writer obsessed with the minutiae of his childhood and his own appetites. The first section of this memoir is a detailed account of the small town where he grew up. It might have interested me more had it been a small English town and I could relate to the cultural references. In the second section I began to understand why he fancies himself as a Lothario. He had a skin disease (and a stammer) which seems to have crippled his self-esteem. Every sexual conquest was no doubt a victory over the intimation of ugliness he saw when he looked at himself in a mirror. Nevertheless, I still found his preening boastful tone annoying. At one point he throws in a sentence about masturbating the wife of a friend in a car while his wife is sitting in the front seat. It had no context. Just came across as a schoolboy boast. Later we discover he was opposed to the peace movement in the 1960s. He spends forty pages telling us why. His arguments make you think he would have made a nicely subservient subject under Nazi rule in Germany. He then admits he doesn't care a jot about the future of the planet. Surprise surprise! You might say he was ahead of his time as he comes across like one of these new Republicans who refer to all liberals as snowflakes. It also becomes clear that the obnoxious serial adulterer and dutiful Christian in his novel Couples was a self-portrait. He's Mr Bad Boy of domestic arrangements always insisting on the primacy of his own appetites. Towards the end there's a letter to his grandchildren which I found unreadable in its endless unrolling of localised detail. One assumes in a memoir the author is telling the truth. Trouble with Updike with his preening pantomime villain act is you wonder if he knows what the truth is. At one point he informs us that he derives little nourishment from writing. Later he refers to himself as the whip holder in all his relationships. His second wife, in an interview, described him as the best tempered person she had ever known. That might also indicate he didn't care very deeply about anything, which, his childhood aside, is how he comes across. My prediction is his reputation will wane with time. Now I'm looking forward to reading something a lot less self-consciously literary!

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-11 00:00:00 Anthony Wilson Updike is a terrific writer. He exhibits this "self-consciously" in these reflections on his life, times and family. It's humbling to read someone whose narratives seem to flow with such ease, and with such felicity. He led a special life, and his ability to describe it so fluently gives away why. I especially appreciated the chapter regarding life during the sixties, "On Not Being a Dove."