Subject: hapworth/Updike
From: William Hochman (wh14@is9.nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 08:23:58 EDT
I"ve been working on the proofs for an interview with John Updike coming
out this summer and found a post card he sent me. I had sent him a piece
on Hapwroth I wrote and he responded by saying "How odd Kakutani [the NY
Times reviewer who had ripped Hapworth to shreds when word of its
republication was buzzing] called it charmless, when her prose is about as
charmless as it gets. Hapworth etc. is indubitably a work from the
Master's pen, but it shows the pen in the process of exploding, and I
can't imagine what would have come next, on this expanding curve. No less
an authority than Truman Capote (a terrible liar) repoted to me that he
heard Shawn, in tears, rejecting the next story over the phone."
For those reading Hapworth (still one of my favorite Salinger texts!), I'd
like to know what parts work best for you, will
ps: the double irony to Updike's comments about Kakutani is that in the
interview we talked quite a bit about critics based on "Beck Noir," a
story in which a writer responds to criticism like a hit man...
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