Hints and tips:
...They are no longer the “obscene mockery” that John Updike once described....
...Putting Myra Breckinridge on a par with John Updike’s Couples and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint is likely to remain an assessment shared only by Vidal himself, who once declared in an essay on F Scott...
...Updike mocked what he called Fitzgerald’s “eternal undergraduate effluvium”....
...John Updike and Philip Roth pop their heads in once or twice to make a passing remark; Joan Didion, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling make equally brief appearances to offer much-quoted aperçus....
...Although Vann handles his portrayal of marital atrophy expertly, readers of Updike, Ford, Franzen and a dozen others may feel that they’ve seen the same thing done just as well before....
...Tom Wolfe, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen – all have been Kakutanied. Yet none of them would even recognise her in the street....
...Aged 19, as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence University, she won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest....
...The Pomegranates of Kandhar By Sarah Maguire Chatto & Windus £9, 80 pages FT bookshop price: £7.20 A patient, restrained work that shows off Maguire’s customary skill in observing nature and horticulture...
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