14. Updike, compared to Roth, suffered from the defuseness of having a wide range of interest & restless need to experiment narratively.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
15. Udpike's insatiable intellectual curiosity, his need to figure things out & try to inhabit other people's minds, is something Roth lacks
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16. Philip Roth had an older brother, Updike was an only child. Roth's sense of fraternal rivalry evident in fiction, Updike's in criticism
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17. Having no real brother, Updike saw the male novelists roughly his own age as siblings to emulate & be jealous of.
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18. Updike reviewed almost every book between Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock (Roth's strongest period).
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19. Updike's reviews of Roth have the intensity of a talent judging his closest competitor: shrewd and alert for signs of weakness.
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20. In her memoir Claire Bloom has a story about Updike & Roth which is probably not true but revealing as a kind of folklore
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21. According to Bloom, Roth was so upset over Updike's ungenerous review of Operation Shylock he had nervous breakdown & was hospitalized.
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22. People who know Roth say Bloom's story is baloney. Hospitalization due to being wrongly prescribed Halcion.
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23. Still Bloom's story is interesting as gossip/folklore: something Bloom wrote because she knew it hit a sore spot with Roth.
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24. Operation Shylock was last Roth novel Updike reviewed.
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25. 25. As both Claudia Roth Pierpont and Adam Begley point out, Updike/Roth friendship ended with Updike seemed to endorse Bloom's book.
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26. Here's the exchange the marked the end of the Updike/Roth friendship:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/mar/04/slight-revision/ …
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