Why Updike?
This book was more libidinous than a high school boy’s locker room.

But that’s unfair. I’m sure not all locker rooms are this bad.
Hyperdetailed. Meandering. The man could write description. But, in so many cases he dwells on images we can do without. Plot and characters go out the window. We get long passages about the exact process of making a sandwich, a few pages for each little maneuver of these grotesquely high-definition bodies moving through space.

Occasionally, you run across a book that makes you doubt a writer’s sanity. You could lose faith in an author this way, or you could keep rummaging through their oeuvre searching for the Jekyll-Hyde, good-bad, failure-triumphs until a very tainted opinion coalesces. I thought editors were supposed to point out obvious, heinous literary crimes, no matter how frillily the writer dressed them up. Maybe, after a certain point of popularity, you can just get away with anything.