The table of contents for the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker is enough to make me regard the prospect of two or three free hours with more than the usual volume of longing: Hendrick Hertzberg on Obama punching in (marred only by a nugget of innumeracy--see whether you can spot it), D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace, an excerpt from Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, John Updike's review of a biography of John Cheever, and Roger Angell on Joe Torre.
Alas, there is an elegiac aspect to my reading pleasure. Wallace is dead, a suicide. Updike recently died of cancer. Angell, well into his 80s, profiles Torre, a cancer survivor. It is possible that The New Yorker is becoming superannuated. On the other hand, it is also possible that it has been threatening to become superannuated now for a long time while continuing to be the best general interest magazine published in the U.S.
Updike's review, presumably composed in the last working days of his life, exhibits a measure of peevishness that is unusual in his reviewing oeuvre. Cheever was a personal friend, and Updike sounds put off by Blake Bailey's biography, a "faithful adherence" that adds up only to a "painstaking chronology of a tormented man's struggle with himself." Bailey's final assessment, says Updike, is "rather stunningly anticlimactic," and he calls attention to the claim, on page 700-something out of 770, that "Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated." Why bother, Updike almost asks, if Cheever was as inconsequential as all that?
And his answer would be that a stroll through Cheever's fiction is more rewarding than this biographer's slow crawl through the drunk 2 p.m.s of too many of his days. Is Cheever not taught in the schools? So much the worse for them and their students, who instead are subjected to the "collegiate romanticism" of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thus pronounces, rather shockingly, John Updike, whose glittering reviews for fifty years eschewed shocking pronouncements. I wonder whether he accepted this assignment before he knew he was dying and, somewhere before page 700, began to resent that he was spending his short time with such a poor companion.
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