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Volume CCXXXVI, Number 131  June 23, 2006 

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It's been a long dry spell for the supposed Dean of American Novelists ever since Harry Angstrom bought the farm. Tristan and Isolde in Brazil? [Hey, we saw that one – Adult Entertainment Ed.] A post-apocalyptic future in which money is named after Bill Weld? No sale.

Better take on a red-hot topic; in this case, the making of an Islamic terrorist who probably isn't much of a golfer and wouldn't go near three fingers of Chivas. Based on his track record, you wouldn't expect Updike to do very well with angry minorities. Remember Skeeter in Rabbit Redux or the gay office manager in Rabbit is Rich? When it comes to protagonists, The Author likes them white, male, Protestant and unzipped.

And why did he set his latest in Newark, New Jersey? Maybe his hero will blow up Nathan Zuckerman. Updike would love that.

Our advice: go back to those horny blonde WASP babes who liked to be driven down the old dirt road. Updike's heroes used to find God in there somewhere, although lots of us poor readers were always able to tell the difference between the Almighty and a mighty orgasm.

Tim Russert, heir to Andy Rooney's coveted title as America's most unendurable TV gasbag [Aren't you forgetting Bill O'Reilly? – Television Ed.], returns to the ranks of the unreadable with a clip job of other people gassing on about their fathers. It's a twofer: for 23 bucks, you'll have something to give to Dad and Tim can build that guest house on his Siasconset estate.

Russert's latest ragbag follows hard upon his prior money maker, in which he described the wit and wisdom of his dad, a Buffalo sanitation man. Russert may have hailed his dad for earning an honest living picking up garbage, but his brownnosing spawn has done his dad much better: he's made millions in royalties spreading it around.

Hey, we've got kids of our own. Our fatherly advice to them: suck up to drunken old Senators and TV executives and you too could rake in big bucks lobbing softballs at Washington hacks and pushing books with your moon face plastered on the cover. And we didn't even charge the little bastards $23 for our pearl of wisdom. That must be the difference between peons like us and Tim Russert.

The shelves of the unreadable groan under the weight of books that purport to tell women how they should live their lives. But there's always room for one more, as New Yorker hack Caitlin Flanagan proves with her debut on the unreadable list.

You'd think that the millions of American women who juggle family and career, or who have decided to focus on one rather than the other, would be able to calculate for themselves what they have gained or lost thereby without Flanagan or their own mothers hectoring them. (One thing they can all agree on, per Cathi Lindauer: that lump on the couch is no help at all!)

Mom Flanagan apparently thinks that her fellow upper class women (whom she herself admits are the only ones who get to make this choice) should put down their scalpels and Blackberries and spend more time cooking, cleaning, chasing after the rugrats and polishing hubby's rocket [Perhaps she's on to something there? – Ed.].

That may be good enough for the great unwashed, but our authoress is so busy typing up her wisdom and hustling her buns around the country promoting her book that she's got a nanny for her kids, a maid to do the wash and a gardener for her no-doubt-impressive rose bushes. No word on whom she's hired to service hubby.