DeLillo in New Yorker (Updike as reviewer)

[Prsamsa at aol.com]

I agree with your crit.  about the New Yorker and Updike.  About two years 
ago,
he just butchered a review on Denis Johnson's new book.  The guard has 
changed,
the avante-garde is busy marching away from boring-married-white-guy fiction, 
so
Updike or anyone from that generation shouldn't be reviewing things they miss 
half the context of (ala the Hendrix passage), and Updike is left sounding 
prissy and
flat, just as in his fiction, where you can have lots of sex but then you 
have to analyze it to death.  

Of course the New Yorker hardly acknowledged Kerouac or the Beats until many 
years after Jack K. died, so churning low-high culture to a froth seems 
beyond their ken, unless we're talking the original brilliant crew of Parker, 
Benchley, SJ Perlman, then Salinger as their short-story star;    They seem 
to leave really avante-garde fiction
to the "big" littles like and hug the middle of the road;   But they 
published a short by George Saunders, so who knows?

It's a great magazine, it just seems the avante-garde has so many more places 
to
place stories than the old days.  

Perry, "Samsa". 
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