Not P but DFW: a mean parody

[Mike Jing]

Looking over it again, I can see indeed all three meanings are possible. It
keeps flip-flopping on me. It's almost as if I'm looking at the M. C.
Escher print* Convex and Concave.*


On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:45 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*:
>
> The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the
> line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years. Toward
> the End of Time does have flashes of beautiful writing—deer described as
> “tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese beetles,” a
> car’s tight turn as a “slur” and its departure as a “dismissive
> acceleration down the driveway.” But a horrific percentage of the book
> consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to
> my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its
> mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it
> begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and
> “This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues
> of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole reams
> of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our
> independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or
> honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—and so much subordination—“As our species,
> having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out,
> move in”—and such heavy alliteration—“the broad sea blares a blue I would
> not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less
> like John Updike than like somebody doing *a mean parody* of John Updike.
>
> I thought the word "mean" here is used with an approbative connotation,
> i.e. the parody is considered very well done, instead of being poorly done
> or mean-spirited, is that correct?
>
>