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John Updike wrote it all down

John Updike wrote it all down

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·December 9, 2025
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dang

I can't remember how I ran across it (some link in a newsletter maybe?) but this is a hilarious review of the same book: https://freebeacon.com/culture/getting-intimate-with-updike/.

Here's a sample:

One of the great American stylists, [Updike] nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as "an immense whispering" was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time.

bryanrasmussen

I think part of the problem for Updike where sex is concerned is his protagonists are often thinly veiled stand ins for Updike, imagining Updike having sex would have been like imagining your parents, for that generation, and then he keeps talking about it. Now it's more like your grandparents. It's like when granny tells you she got a tongue piercing because it really helps with fellatio, that stuff really increases the cringe factor.