SOURCE: "A Materialist Look at Eros," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVI, No. 33, October 1, 1990, pp. 107-10.

Below, Updike describes Vargas Llosa's erotic novel, In Praise of the Stepmother, as a work that vividly and seriously treats the subject of sex and sensuality.

Literature owes a debt to the Peruvian electorate, for recently declining to elect Mario Vargas Llosa to the thankless position of being their President. So elegant, pessimistic, and Europeanized a literary performer's candidacy for this high office, amid the perils of terrorism and the sludge of daily speechifying, seems, at our distance, even more mysterious than Norman Mailer's campaign for the New York mayoralty or Gore Vidal's gracious offer, some years ago, to serve as a senator from California. Novelists presumably understand the workings of the world, and perhaps would govern no worse than lawyers, movie stars, or retired oilmen, but why anyone with an opportunity...