SOURCE: “Writer-Consciousness,” in The New Yorker, December 25, 1989, pp. 103-8.

In the following excerpt, Updike offers a tempered assessment of The Afternoon of a Writer, which he notes may appear “pompous” and “claustrophobic” to American readers despite its “phenomenal intensity.”

Harold Ross, the founding editor of this weekly, was wary of, among many other things, “writer-consciousness,” and would mark phrases and sentences wherein, to his sensibility, the writer, like some ugly giant squid concealed beneath the glassy impersonality of the prose, was threatening to surface. Writing, that is, like our grosser animal functions, could not be entirely suppressed but shouldn’t be performed in the open. Yet fashions in aesthetic decorum change. Modernism, by the spectacular nature of its experiments, invited admiring or irritated awareness of the experimenting author. Intentionally or not, the written works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and...