There were too many good books in the world to waste time on prose that was vitiated by ego and roundly despised by writers I admired, and so each time I had the opportunity to read a new author, I chose something else. The criticism I’d read made his writing sound dull. I would love to concoct some sororal ceremony in which I lay my right hand on Sexual Politics and solemnly swear him off, but, in truth, the decision was more incremental, and my reasons more trivial. Such complaints were pervasive enough by the time I began reading that it was easy for me to dismiss his oeuvre entirely. Perhaps most memorably, there was novelist and essayist Anna Shapiro, who claimed that Updike’s novels left the female reader “hoping that the men in your own life weren't, secretly, seeing you that way - as a collection of compelling sexual organs the possession of which doomed you to ridicule-worthy tastes and concerns.” There was David Foster Wallace, who, in a 1997 review, popularized the epithet (attributed to a female friend), “Just a penis with a thesaurus.” Then there was the writer Emily Gould, who placed him among the “midcentury misogynists” - a pantheon that also included Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. LIKE SO MANY WOMEN who came of age after the turn of the millennium, I was warned about John Updike almost as soon as I became aware of him.
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