{"id":2778,"date":"2009-02-14T10:29:56","date_gmt":"2009-02-14T15:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=2778"},"modified":"2009-02-14T10:29:56","modified_gmt":"2009-02-14T15:29:56","slug":"talent-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/talent-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Talent Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have always thought that J. B. Priestley&#8217;s view of his own work could well apply to John Updike; not that Updike would have the modesty to admit it. Priestley thought of himself as a talented, but not great novelist.<\/p>\n<p>So while I don&#8217;t think that John Updike was a great novelist, I do agree that he was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/faithbased\/3339236\/why-updike-was-a-spiritual-failure.thtml\" target=\"_blank\">spiritual failure<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>John Updike, who died two weeks ago, was certainly a great novelist; his books are <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/article_images\/articledir_6678\/3339236\/1_listing.jpg\" alt=\"Add an Image\" width=\"129\" height=\"180\" \/>intelligent without being clever-clever, and are highly readable. And he was the only major novelist of recent times who was interested in Protestant theology (a massive plus-point for me). So I ought to be a big fan, and for a while I was, but the more I read, the less sure I became. It perhaps sounds an unpleasant thing to say about a recently deceased person, but I see him as a spiritual failure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is somewhat redeeming, though:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But he said some great things along the way, including this nice little anticipation of Dawkins: <em>&#8216;Among the repulsiveness of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.&#8217;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have always thought that J. B. Priestley&#8217;s view of his own work could well apply to John Updike; not that Updike would have the modesty to admit it. Priestley thought of himself as a talented, but not great novelist. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/talent-redux\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[2062],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}