Hugging the Shore
It was with this gargantuan collection of book reviews and essays (919 pages) that Updike established himself as a top-shelf literary critic. Built up steadily over the years, it was illuminating to see all this work in one place. Yet despite sterling pieces on everyone from Saul Bellow to Kurt Vonnegut to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Ernest Hemingway, he tried his best to minimize the practice, noting that “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.” We respectfully disagree — Hugging the Shore is full of amazing stuff.
