A well-versed reader alerts me that in the current Voice, David Ng skewers John Updike’s May 22 New Yorker review of Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island:

Mankind asks for everlasting life, and he receives it. But as Daniel25 learns, it’s a mixed blessing at best. What does zero times infinity equal? Each Daniel realizes in his own way that life is neither good nor bad; it’s just there. And so are Houellebecq’s novels, which exist far beyond the realm of morality. Reviewers intent on taking him down (as John Updike attempted in a recent New Yorker) come off as prudish and puny. Houellebecq’s infinite void swallows everything and spits nothing back.

The last time I read Ng (who pre-softens his barb with an admiring Kael citation in the lede), he was carelessly misreading Juliette Binoche’s character in Caché, but perhaps he’s right here; Updike may not have been the ideal critic for this sort of book. These two bloggers (“like a 1st year undergrad in lit class, I’m going to highlight The Important Pointth and Themeth in Updike’s critithism”) agree (“The catch is that Updike himself offers Hef-style hedonism; it’s exactly his softcore sensibility that is turned off by the dissociated raunch Houellebecq peddles”), mounting the podium in aggrieved defense of Fun. Dissenting opinions welcome.