Updike on Chinese Food

What a thrill to have come upon Rabbit Redux, which I read first, followed by Rabbit Run. John Updike, who died today at age 76 of lung cancer, came to speak at a writing class I took with Anne Bernays in around 1977. He must have just been married to Martha then; she looked adoringly at him the whole time.

No novel that I've read includes a better description of Chinese food than Rabbit, Run (and remember the book was published in 1960, pre-Szechuan, during the high-Cantonese period):

"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chest-nuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty. "

And then, later, watching Ruth, in contrast to the repellant Margaret:

"No I don't know," she says. "I don't think so." She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver."

Share your favorite Updike-isms (?) Updikelettes (?).

Donald Antrim's Another Manhattan

Reading Like A Writer
The Donald Antrim short story, Another Manhattan, which appeared in the New Yorker's winter fiction issue (December 22 and 29, 2008) was the most depressing story I've read in a long while. Then why did I feel so much better after reading it? What made the story so humane, so beautiful, so uplifting? Feel free to answer because I think this is why those of us who love literature love it. It's like coming out over and over again as a human being.