I found John Updike’s Hugging the Shore through Critical Mass’s the Critical Library series of posts, where this collection repeatedly came up. It’s out of print and, I suspect, a book that shaped older critics but is no longer essential and feels too much likes its opinions, like most, have either become accepted or unimportant. Like many revolutions, the ideas in Hugging the Shore seem to have become part of the ossified landscape. Some of the pieces still thrill: the one on Ursula K. Leguin is short but good, while those on Bellow seem to both stretch and not be able to wrap themselves around Bellow. Many of Updike’s opinions I respect, but, at the same time, I flip to the next essay halfway through the one I’m on.

To me, something like Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971 – 2000 feels more vital, for lack of a better term, and maybe Amis’s verbal pyrotechnics show off, but they also convince. Give me it instead of Hugging the Shore, and throw in Orwell’s Essays (more on Orwell here) to give an overview of many of the same topics but better. I like Hugging the Shore, but with criticism even more than novels the essential is everything.