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A FAN'S NOTES | On Updike's Long Game

It was a commonplace even hack a few decades ago to insist that American writers, at their best, were beautiful and damned, to borrow a title from one of the most beautiful and damned of all. They either drank themselves to death too soon, or wrote themselves out too rapidly, became self-made cartoons like Hemingway or Life magazine pundits like Steinbeck, retreated into silence like Salinger or embarrassed us with noise like Mailer. The great American novels were one-offs-The Red Badge of Courage, The Great Gatsby-preceding either a sad long decline, or else a final stellar explosion.

This was so much part of the myth of American writing that it had, in a reverse twist, almost become a ...

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