Maybe it's just me. There's a large likihood it is.

I have tried to get him. I have tried to love him and to rave about him and to devour him with reckless abandon. I have tried to look past what I see as flaws, flaws which the rest of the world see as perfection. I'm clinging onto him by a fine thread, like a wobbly tooth clinging to the bleeding gum, buffeted by a relentless tongue. I am the tooth. He is the gum. The tongue his flaw.

I am only talking about John Updike here, so had better not get too carried away in flawed and possibly irrelevent analogies. I'm reading Villages at the moment, almost an epic tale of one man and his ... everything. His first house (details of). His Sunday Walk (details of). His first love/first wife/last wife/anything inbetween (details of). His work (details of, with lots of additional nice abbreviations in awkard capitals stuck in to confuse people like me). Do you see a reaccuring pattern? Yes. The details of.

The Daily Telegraph may herald Updike as possessing "an artist's eye". There may be those who believe his "scrutiny" to be "clear as a magnifying glass", or that this scrutiny "burns images on to the reader's mind." (Ouch.) But really?

For me it's scrutiny which makes for ungainly and long sentences. Sentences which, were they to be read aloud, could be classed as almost a health risk. Not only to the reader (at what point in this sentence am I allowed to breathe??) but also to the listener (if this sentence continues on like this for much longer, I might have to inject some light relief into the situation by banging my head repeatedly against this shelf of books.)

On a more serious note, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I have forgotten what the beginning said, and have to return to find a link between the one bit of superfluous detail and the next.

It's sentences like this which make me grind the enamel from my teeth and skim-read the next two chapters in despair and futile reader-retalliation:

"Owen, when younger even than when Alice Stottlemeyer kissed him, and not yet envious of families with easy chairs and dartboards and electric-train tracks set up on easy plywood tables in their basements, was enchanted by the plugged-in washing machine's powerful, rhythmic back-and-forth beating action, stirring up a mass of bubbles, and by the smell of soap flakes, so strong it seemed to scour clean his head and sinuses, and by the woody, springy scent of the wicker basket with its handles so far apart he could not at first reach both.

That was one sentence. Even if conjuring up quite powerful, homey images, the mere length of the thing is so daunting I shied away from it at first, eyes roaming nervously from full stop to full stop. And even Cat Stevens (sorry, Yussef) can conjure up powerful, homey images without half-killing himself in the process. Think of Remember The Days - warm toast for tea, simplicity and all that jazz.

That's not to say I don't to some extent enjoy the book.