On Literary Fiction: Nabokov’s Influence on Updike

CARICATURES BY DAVID LEVINE

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation or ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen-sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

Adam Gopnik

U.R. Bowie

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