WRB—Jan. 14, 2026

“big thing around here”

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with Washington and New York.

Links:

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, an excerpt from Gayle Feldman’s biography of Bennett Cerf (Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, January 13) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 7, 2026.] about his trip to William Faulkner’s funeral:

  Later, when the extended kin and very few outsiders—Bennett; Donald; Faulkner’s friend Shelby Foote (deep into writing his Civil War history for Random House); Linton Massey, a devoted scholar and collector of all things Faulkner; and a couple of others—gathered in the parlor with the immediate family, Estelle recalled that Bennett had told her about Styron. She beckoned him, one more outsider, in. They listened as an Episcopalian minister slowly intoned a 10-minute service over the coffin: a few Bible selections, the Lord’s Prayer, no eulogy, as simple as Bill would have wanted. Afterward, they got into the Chevy, part of a crocodile of cars behind the black-finned Cadillac hearse heading toward the square and then the cemetery.

  Bennett looked at the battered old cars and could only sniff and shake his head at such a clapped-out cortege. Yet peering again from inside the blessed air-conditioning, he found himself jolted anew, the big city slicker brought short by a sudden transformation in the queer hick town. It was as though a spell had been cast: nothing moved, every shop was closed, and the residents stood—about a third of the folks were Black—in the square or on balconies, silent, watching, erect, respectful. Police covered their hearts with their caps. All motion and sound ceased, except for the snap-and-flash of photographers’ cameras and scratching of pens on reporters’ pads; waiting on a knoll above the gravesite, they had converged from all over, ants to a picnic.

  Funerals “are a big thing around here,” one laconic onlooker told Styron.

  [As described here this feels like a Wes Anderson scene, which somehow I doubt it actually was. But then Anderson at his best heightens the emotion by heightening the mannerism. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Nation, Vivian Gornick reviews John Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025 and WRB—Dec. 13, 2025.]

  In the main, Updike’s work belongs to the Howells class of American writers—these are definitely his people—but Updike himself, hardly a Protestant patrician, was something of an intermediary between the suburban liberals of whom he usually wrote and the working stiffs he incarnated as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Readers long suspected that deep within, in a place he didn’t visit openly, Updike not only sympathized with Harry; he was Harry, possessed of those same primitive feelings of rage and resentment, scorn and deprivation, the same loudmouthed patriotism that drove the Rabbit. And, indeed, the Berthoff letter confirms the suspicion. Angstrom is that part of Updike that the rest of his work papered over, the part that allowed him to dive as deep as he could go as a writer. The bloodlessness—that is, the lack of felt life—that characterizes Updike’s New Yorker stories and suburban novels disappears in the Rabbit books, and the writing sinks to the level required for literary depth. Selected Letters of John Updike needed more of Harry Angstrom and less of William Dean Howells to become memorable.

  [I can only speak as someone who writes letters in 2025, and if you’re doing that nothing you do in a letter can be more stylized or more artificial than the choice to write a letter. No doubt people sent raw, unfiltered letters once upon a time, but if we want to do that now we can text.

  One of the more clarifying things I’ve read about Updike was a piece on Adam Roberts’ Substack about his early work (as linked to and discussed in WRB—Dec. 14, 2024): “America is, in other words, a superannuated adolescent, inhabiting a big and powerful body, and with considerable charm and sex appeal, but lacking self-discipline and commitment to duty.” For “America” read “Harry Angstrom.” Read “John Updike,” too, for that matter. Attempting to figure out what America is has always been something Americans going through a life crisis do. This is why no one who approaches the question ever concludes that things are going pretty well. America instead becomes a source of interior and exterior corruptions, historical errors, grave misunderstandings, and—really, when you get down to it—potential unactualized, a lofty dream pulled down into the muck.

  The question then becomes, what is the dream? To quote Roberts:

  What makes this kind of deliberately vivified style different from the technically similar, differently focused other kind of vivified style for which Updike is famous, or infamous—I mean his baroquely cod-Keatsian descriptions of fucking and vaginas, the “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” stuff Patricia Lockwood so brilliantly critiqued, in the essay quoted above—is that this stuff is clearer, actually, on the way an individual like Rabbit can only conceptualize religious transcendence in quasi-erotic terms.

  Codpiece-Keatsian, surely. And this goes for Rabbit’s creator, too, who was (I learn from Gornick) capable of writing the phrase “your cunt is somehow your soul.” Updike’s wish in that letter to be transformed into a massive penis is somehow touching, a version of “we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump” that suggests instead that everything can go on pretty much as it is and that the only dream worth having is that of sensual pleasure uncomplicated by the rest of life. There’s a whole kind of prose fiction devoted to exploring the lives of people who think like this. It’s called the novel. A lot of them are about adultery. —Steve]

• In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews a poem by Matthew Rice (plastic: A Poem, January 13):

  Before it was a thing, before it was a noun, plastic was an adjective (see the plastic arts) meaning shaping or shaped, having the power to give form, or being formed in turn. (Henry James, in The Portrait of a Lady, notes the aesthete Rosier’s “fine sense of the plastic.”) Outside the realms of myth and religion, has a substance ever seemed so miraculous but abject, mundane and full of potential? Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957) calls it a “disgraced” material: “lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal; it embodies none of the genuine produce of the mineral world: foam, fibres, strata.” In Alain Resnais’s short film Le chant du styrène (1958)—with poetic text by Raymond Queneau—plastic has arrived from a colorful future of both fantastic and natural forms, but the most extraordinary sight is its production: the fusion and transmutation of particles into something apparently infinite, creamily self-same and cheaply sensuous. Admired and despised at mid-century for its ubiquity, plastic is now of course the very image of poisonous insinuation and latency. Plastic becomes plastics and in turn microplastics, and those are never going away.

  • Ray Davies:

    He’s got plastic flowers growing up the walls

    He eats plastic food with a plastic knife and fork

    He likes plastic cups and saucers ’cause they never break

    And he likes to lick his gravy off a plastic plate

    [One of the best Kinks songs, but even Kinks fans are too scared to wholeheartedly embrace the band at its goofiest and most music hall. In a related story, their best song is “Mr. Pleasant.” No one will tell you this but me. —Steve]

  • The Graduate (1967): “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. . . . Plastics.”

  • [There is also that meme where dinosaurs get turned into oil, oil gets turned into plastic, and plastic gets turned into plastic dinosaurs, which makes explicit the idea of plastic as ersatz immortality behind both the Kinks song and the line from The Graduate. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I attempt to remember that the second half of the twentieth century happened

• Taste and orientalism

• K. T. on a Poem by Chet’la Sebree and etymology

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]