Garth Greenwell was born in 1978 and first read The Swimming-Pool Library when he was twenty (around the time Updike was reviewing The Spell). ‘Novels about heterosexual partnering … do involve the perpetuation of the species.’ How this was involved in the oral sex in Couples (1968) or the anal sex in Rabbit Is Rich (1982) wasn’t explained. Never mind that Updike’s own work displayed a comparable attentiveness to the shapes and shades, tensions and textures of female genitalia that was an altogether more meaningful business. Reviewing Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell, in 1999, he complained that ‘our noses are rubbed, as it were, in the poetry of a love object’s anus’ and about the author’s habit of recording ‘penile sizes, tilts, tints and flavours … with a botanical precision’. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex. I n U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero.
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