Ever since he made his two-pronged prose debut in 1959 with The Poorhouse Fair and The Same Door, John Updike has delivered approximately one work of fiction per year. Few modern novelists have approached this level of productivity, which suggests a kind of late-Victorian stamina and linguistic lust for life. Even fewer have simultaneously churned out, as Updike has, a constant stream of reviews, essays, reminiscences, and occasional pieces. His custom is to collect this abundance every decade or so, disguising the substantial nature of these volumes with throwaway titles like Picked-Up Pieces and Odd Jobs. The latest such cornucopia is More Matter--and, like its predecessors, this 928-page behemoth reminds us that Updike is among our most discerning and omnivorous critics.

His title, this time, echoes Queen Gertrude's editorial advice to Polonius: "More matter, with less art." Only reluctantly does Updike assent to our age's appetite for facts, facts, and more facts, with fiction relegated to a kind of imaginative finger bowl: Human curiosity, the abettor and stimulant of the fiction surge between Robinson Crusoe's adventures and Constance Chatterley's, has become ever more literal-minded and impatient with the proxies of the imagination. Present taste runs to the down-home divulgences of the talk show--psychotherapeutic confession turned into public circus--and to investigative journalism that, like so many heat-seeking missiles, seeks out the intimate truths, the very genitals, of Presidents and princesses. Strong stuff, that last line, especially from the man whom Nicholson Baker called "the first novelist to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphoric prose."

But if Updike's critical investigations tend to stay above the belt, they remain as wide-ranging and elegant as ever. In More Matter, he takes on Herman Melville and Mickey Mouse, Abraham Lincoln and the male body--not to mention the cream of modern cosmology. His formulations on almost any subject seem ripe for the commonplace book. Here he is on sexual appetite: "Lust, which begins in a glance of the eye, is a searching, and its consummation, step by step, a knowing." On the short story: "The inner spaces that a good short story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion." On the austerity of biblical narrative: "The original Gospels evince a flinty terseness, a refusal, or inability, to provide the close focus and cinematic highlighting that the modern mind expects." And finally, on the raw intimacies of John Cheever's published journals: His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the deep gulf between outward appearance and inward condition; they present, with an almost unbearable fullness, a post-Adamic man, an unreconciled bundle of cravings and complaints, whose consolations--the glory of the sky, the company of his young sons--have the ring of hollow cheer in the vastness of his dissatisfaction. Comparatively, the journals of Kierkegaard and Emerson are complacent and academic. These sentences neatly unite the author's literary and theological concerns--although the latter topic takes something of a back seat in More Matter--and remind us of the compound pleasures of his prose. In his preface, Updike refers to the book as "my fifth such collection and--dare we hope?--my last." We very much hope not. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
Many American writers this century have been called brilliant and accomplished, but Updike is the real thing, as this huge collection of personal essays, social commentary, book reviews, introductions, interviews and occasional pieces amply attests. It is astonishing that a volume of nearly 200 piecesAmost written for such intellectual venues as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, but some penned for the mass audiences of Newsweek and USAir MagazineArepresents only eight years' work at a time when Updike was producing roughly a novel every two years. But perhaps even more surprising is his range, depth and originality. Segueing freely from the latest biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the nature of evil to cars, cartoons and burglar alarms, these essays are bursting with sentiments and observations that defy ideology or neat categorization. Just when you think Updike is a cultural conservative (he deems young men's haircuts "hostile," mocks Borges and debates the serial comma), he defends Jacques Derrida (against Camille Paglia, no less). Just when you think he is refined and cautious (shaving the metaphysical line between "freedom" and "equality"), he turns irreverent (referring to Helen Keller jokes and "God in a lilac shortie nightgown" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Some pieces are prophetic, such as his comments in 1996 on our fascination with the Titanic disaster. Unlike most journalism, Updike's occasional writing is so exquisite as to repay multiple readings. And not least among the many virtues of this book, the 50th of his career, is its sheer fact of convenient assembly. BOMC alternate selection. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In his 50th book, Updike gathers eight years' worth of occasional pieces, book reviews, awards speeches, autobiographical ruminations, and cultural criticism. He plies his well-honed literary craftsmanship on subjects ranging from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard and the quasi-American rodent Mickey Mouse to photography, cartooning, and his favorite author, Henry Green. In an essay on old movie houses, for example, Updike remarks that although television's flood of sitcoms may not be much "crasser or more mechanical than the run of old-fashioned Hollywood fare," the motion picture "for Americans was our native opera, bastard and sublime." His astonishing introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville offers such a complete and evenhanded portrait of Melville's life and work that he reminds us what literary criticism used to be like in the hands of masters. Updike's wide-ranging literary sensibility, breathtaking cultural breadth, elegant prose, incisive wit, and gracious style far outstrip the works of his contemporaries like Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth, and this collection makes it clearer than ever that Updike is our preeminent man of letters. An essential purchase.-AHenry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, William H. Pritchard
...how artfully these goods are arranged.... Even more than in previous collections, the range is astonishing.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...More Matter attests to Updike's remarkable versatility ... and to his ardent drive to turn all his observations into glittering, gossamer prose.


From Booklist
Updike's fiftieth book! Is he unwisely prolific? It can be argued that every second or third novel of his is substandard. But let that issue rest for a while and pick up his latest book, his fifth collection of critical essays and other nonfiction pieces. Substandard compared to his previous books of essays? Hardly. This one proves that Updike's intelligence lacks restrictive bounds; it is the perfect showcase for his wondrous eloquence. His curiosity ranges widely, from books and writing to the world of the cinema, and then onto even vaster planes, where he muses on the many intellectual and sensory experiences awaiting anyone with receptivity to quality. He is truly and meaningfully at home in an incredible number of areas of knowledge. His thoughts on the work of Edith Wharton stand as original as his thoughts on the personality and reign of the current queen of England. Updike isn't so much a critic of creativity as a guide to creative ways of viewing things, the difference being the difference between telling and showing. Brad Hooper


From Kirkus Reviews
A strong gathering of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, and autobiographical commentaries written and published over the past eight years. ``Writing criticism,'' Updike explains in an earlier collection of essays and occaisonal pieces, ``is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.'' And so it may be, but plying the estuaries of art and literature in the Updike dinghy remains a pleasure of considerable magnitude. The new book takes its title from Queen Gertrude's admonition to Polonius: ``More matter, with less art.'' Luckily, Updike doesnt stint on matter or art. Like its predecessor volumes, More Matter draws its appeal from Updike's shrewd judgment and unique verbal sparkle, but also from his cosmopolitan range. He moves easily from Kierkegaard to Lincoln and Melville; from Edmond Wilson to Camille Paglia or Joseph Brodsky or Junichiro Tanizaki. The list could go on for quite some time; this book is nearly 1,000 pages long. The abiding Updike themes of sex and religion and the manifold perplexities of American life are in abundant evidence, but a new one appears alongside them: it is old age. Updike is now 67 and has during the 1990s begun to ruminate about what it means to be old and how the US has changed during his lifetime. He touches on it frequently, as in an essay on the liberating suntan culture of the 1950s and 60s: ``The young married beauties with whom my then wife and I spent great chunks of summer sunning on a broad beach north of Boston have in the subsequent decades gone from being nut-brown Pocahontases to looking like Sitting Bull, with a melancholy facial fissure for every broken treaty.'' The key word here is ``melancholy,'' for it is the mood that stimulates a good many of Updike's insights throughout this superior collection. Updike declares in his preface that More Matter will be his last book of collected criticism. Let us hope he changes his mind. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"MORE MATTER ATTESTS TO MR. UPDIKE'S REMARKABLE VERSATILITY AND TO HIS ARDENT DRIVE TO TURN ALL HIS OBSERVATIONS INTO GLITTERING, GOSSAMER PROSE . . . In his strongest pieces, Mr. Updike's awesome pictorial powers of description combine with a rigorous, searching intelligence to produce essays of enormous tactile power and conviction."
-The New York Times

"One of our greatest novelists is also, arguably, our greatest critic of literature."
-The Boston Globe


Review
"MORE MATTER ATTESTS TO MR. UPDIKE'S REMARKABLE VERSATILITY AND TO HIS ARDENT DRIVE TO TURN ALL HIS OBSERVATIONS INTO GLITTERING, GOSSAMER PROSE . . . In his strongest pieces, Mr. Updike's awesome pictorial powers of description combine with a rigorous, searching intelligence to produce essays of enormous tactile power and conviction."
-The New York Times

"One of our greatest novelists is also, arguably, our greatest critic of literature."
-The Boston Globe

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Celebrated as one of America's great prose stylists, John Updike astonishes us here with the range of subjects he considers. Shrewdly admiring essays on American past masters such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edmund Wilson, and Dawn Powell take their place beside penetrating assessments of contemporary peers and rivals—John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Martin Amis. Here too are brilliantly original essays on religion and literature, lust and dancing, as well as a revealing selection of pieces about himself and his work. Whether he's writing about photography or film, golf or adultery, Bill Clinton's hair or the sinking of the Titanic, Updike never fails to dazzle or surprise. Generous, learned, and wickedly funny, More Matter is a triumph of style and substance.

FROM THE CRITICS

William H. Pritchard - NY Times Book Review

It would be a mistake to think that [Updike] gives any less of himself, is any less fully engaged and serious, in his essays and criticism...Even more than in previous collections, the range is astonishing...

Publishers Weekly

Many American writers this century have been called brilliant and accomplished, but Updike is the real thing, as this huge collection of personal essays, social commentary, book reviews, introductions, interviews and occasional pieces amply attests. It is astonishing that a volume of nearly 200 pieces--most written for such intellectual venues as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, but some penned for the mass audiences of Newsweek and USAir Magazine--represents only eight years' work at a time when Updike was producing roughly a novel every two years. But perhaps even more surprising is his range, depth and originality. Segueing freely from the latest biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the nature of evil to cars, cartoons and burglar alarms, these essays are bursting with sentiments and observations that defy ideology or neat categorization. Just when you think Updike is a cultural conservative (he deems young men's haircuts "hostile," mocks Borges and debates the serial comma), he defends Jacques Derrida (against Camille Paglia, no less). Just when you think he is refined and cautious (shaving the metaphysical line between "freedom" and "equality"), he turns irreverent (referring to Helen Keller jokes and "God in a lilac shortie nightgown" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Some pieces are prophetic, such as his comments in 1996 on our fascination with the Titanic disaster. Unlike most journalism, Updike's occasional writing is so exquisite as to repay multiple readings. And not least among the many virtues of this book, the 50th of his career, is its sheer fact of convenient assembly. BOMC alternate selection. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It's always fun to hear from Updike, even when we get bits and pieces like these essays, criticism, addresses, etc., but what is noteworthy here is that this is Updike's 50th book. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

The popular American writer's fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in over the past eight years. They include essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humor, and paragraphs about himself and his work. He considers many particular authors, but also general literary topics such as the nature of evil, the philosophical contents of novels, and the wreck of the . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Bruce Bawer - The Hudson Review