Updike takes a swipe at Toni Morrison

John Updike (pictured), one of America's greatest living novelists, has written a damning review of Toni Morrison's latest book, A Mercy, in the New Yorker. Clearly going for the jugular, he asserts that Morrison, a holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature, fails to portray black characters convincingly in the novel. Given that she is best known for this – she is, of course, black herself – this smacks of of literary heresy.

In his review, Updike wrote: “She [Morrison] does better at finding poetry in this raw, scrappy colonial world than in populating another installment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American. The white characters in A Mercy come to life more readily than the black, and they less ambiguously dramatise America's discovery and settlement.”

A post on the US media blog Gawker sums up the likely response to Updike's Morrison attack. "This is the usual Updike horseshit: finding something to damn with faint praise in A Mercy while undermining Morrison's chronicling of the black experience."