John Updike Hits Literary Milestone with First Porn Novel
Jul 22, 2007, 10:45
NEW YORK - With the publication next summer of Anaconda, his twenty-fourth novel and first attempt at pornography, John Updike will reach a significant milestone, his five-thousandth description of a sex act.
"It's been a long time coming," laughed Mr. Updike from his Massachusetts home. "Almost makes me want to have a cigarette."
Mr. Updike declined to say what sort of sex act will occupy that exalted position, but the seventy-five-year-old author promised it will occur in the first three pages of the book.
"As my audience grows older," he said, "they're more apt to nod off if I don't pique their interest right out of the box."
Indeed, so keen is Mr. Updike on stroking his readers’ libidos, that he has abandoned the fifteen-page descriptions of the town squares in his heroes’ quaint home towns that marked his earlier works.
The anaconda is known to choke its victims.
“This new book, at just ninety-nine pages, is closer to the bone than anything else I’ve done,” said Mr. Updike. “Because it is a pornographic novel, I was free to dispense with needlessly precious dialogue, pages’ worth of internal monologues, and overwrought place settings. I’ve thrown out the vegetables and left the meat in, as it were.”
Although it took Mr. Updike fifty years’ worth of novels, short stories, poems, literary reviews, and children’s books to describe his first 4,999 sex acts, he bids fair to up the ante with Anaconda; and just in case his aging readers’ minds are apt to wonder between his lurid descriptions of missionary, rear-entry, oral, anal, oral-anal, masturbatory, and mutual-masturbatory sex, Mr. Updike has sheathed Anaconda in the roman a cock style.
In this little-used French bawdy conceit, the names of all the male characters, as well as the book’s title and many of the place names where the action unfurls, are slang terms for "penis."
Thus, Anaconda begins in Carnal Stump, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Updike’s protagonist, Willy Frankfurter, spends summers with his Uncle Throbby, a retired school teacher with an impressive collection of child and animal pornography.
After leaving John Thomas High School, Willy matriculates to Harvard, graduates with honors, marries his college sweetheart, Honey Pott, and moves to Thunderstick, a small village on the coast of Massachusetts. He achieves notoriety when his first novel, The Devil’s Plaything, becomes a best seller.
Willy's life quickly turns into a succession of one-night stands after he is caught giving a pearl necklace to the minister’s wife in the Episcopal church basement on Good Friday. Aghast that her husband would stoop so low as to have sex between the hours of 12 noon and 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday, Honey takes their children—Tadger, Tallywhacker, and Tankslapper—and flees.
Following a succession of minor, unacclaimed novels—Cherry Poppin’ Daddy, Mr. Bojangles, and Oyster Probe—Willy seduces and then marries his best friend’s wife and moves to Clam Hammer, another small coastal village in Massachusetts. There he settles into domestic tranquility and contemplates death in a highly acclaimed comeback novel, The Fleshy Winnebago, whose protagonist, Buster Hymen, ponders the notion of sex as salvation and writes a roman a cock when he returns to his small Pennsylvania hometown to attend the funeral of his old friend Chicksicle Reifsnyder.
World War II veterans monument, Thunderstick, Massachusetts.
If Anaconda achieves deep market penetration, look for it to thrust its way quickly onto the big screen. According to Rod Bender, THEM Weekly’s film critic, the massively talented Colin Farrell is already being tipped to play Willie Frankfurter.
Correction: Yesterday we reported that doctors had removed seven polyps from President Bush’s large intestine during a routine colon- oscopy and that the president had nicknamed them the Seven Dwarfs. In reality, five polyps were removed and the president nicknamed them the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
