Not P but DFW: PC backlash

[Mark Kohut]

I definitely think so........the man-woman thing in Updike, so traditional
basically.....I mean The Witches of
Eastwick, what women want to even read that?....his politics were not
Left--progressive.....

I heard a younger generation woman once just say "Updike was just a
prick"...personally...(although she never knew him
other than through his writing or interviews.

I have an unfinished essay 'refuting"-- LOL---I'm so full of myself
sometimes---this particular essay
The "self-absorption of the characters" which many lit crits think mean
well-created characters who
are self-absorbed because Americans of his/our time were...and are?....

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 6:10 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's review of John
> Updike’s *Toward the End of Time*:
>
> Most of the literary readers I know personally are under forty, and a fair
> number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar GMNs.
> But it’s John Updike in particular that a lot of them seem to hate. And not
> merely his books, for some reason—mention the poor man himself and you have
> to jump back:
> . . . . . .
> There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this
> dislike—jealousy, iconoclasm, PC backlash, and the fact that many of our
> parents revere Updike and it’s easy to revile what your parents revere. But
> I think the deep reason so many of my generation dislike Updike and the
> other GMNs has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with
> their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and
> in their characters.
>
> What does "PC backlash" mean here? Does it mean that Updike was considered
> un-PC, thus suffering backlash from PC-minded readers?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>