SOURCE: "Frenchmen: Small Packages," in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, pp. 404-12.

Updike is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, critic, short story writer, poet, essayist, and dramatist. In the following excerpt, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in July 1988, he praises The Mustache as "a nightmare of slippage the author pulled quickly from the placid yuppie textures of the life around him."

The young French writer Emmanuel Carrère is … a formidable magnifier, at least in The Mustache. It is his third novel; his second, Bravoure, won two prizes, the Prix Passion and the Prix de la Vocation, and this one comes to translation into English bedecked with Franco-American praise. The tale's point of departure seems as trivial as a pigeon in the hall: a young Parisian architect, left nameless, decides to shave off the mustache he has been sporting for ten years. Like...