Word: self
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...question that Updike the Elder is putting to his younger self in Widows is this: Once the sex is gone, where does the power come from? ("Everybody needs power," Alexandra tells her daughter. "Otherwise the world eats you up.") Updike has spent his entire career writing about characters who are animated almost solely by the engine of Eros. Now the witches' sex lives are over, but their lives aren't, and you sense Updike's twinkly eyes peering cautiously into the darkness, beyond the glow of the merely fleshly, trying to make out what the world beyond might look like...
...first thing to say about Roth's Indignation is that it's a terrible book. The Roth who wrote Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 was a ranting, sulfurously brilliant stylist whose paragraphs were so full of energy and intelligence gone feral with self-loathing that they practically tore themselves apart on the page. This was a writer who showed us his adolescent hero sinning carnally with a hunk of raw liver that his unsuspecting family ate for dinner later that...
...faults, the Roth of Indignation is interested in subjects outside himself: war, politics, history, death, things that impinge on the warm bubble of self and family. Whereas Portnoy tells his story from a psychiatrist's couch, Marcus narrates Indignation from beyond the grave (or possibly from a morphine coma). He has been drafted into the Korean War--a draft for which Portnoy was a year too young--and he has fallen on the battlefield. You could read this as Roth's quasi-Oedipal execution of his younger alter ego, but it plays more like a correction: Wake up, Portnoy, there...
...Widows and Indignation Updike and Roth are gently upbraiding their younger selves for their narrowness of vision, for their lack of interest in the world around them, in A Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured soul who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look even further--beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous, to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time after...
...misery or quirkiness, and for the confessor, the anonymous unburdening can be a first step toward facing up to a painful event. Frank Warren started the original online confessional, the distinctly secular PostSecret.com--which draws 5 million viewers a month--as an art installation in Washington. He handed out self-addressed postcards to strangers and asked them to write and decorate a secret that a) was true and b) had not yet been told to anyone. He ended up receiving hundreds of cards more than he had given out. Warren--who is currently on a speaking tour of colleges across...