Lust

When John Updike died in 2009, aged 76, he left behind the last great paper trail. Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and art critic, he published with unstoppable fluidity in every genre. The sheer tonnage of his 60-odd books has now been augmented by A Life in Letters, a comparatively small sampling of the 25,000 or so epistles he sent out over the course of his life. This unwieldy volume serves up about 700 of them. I say he wrote with unstoppable fluidity (it was David Foster Wallace who dangled the question ‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’), but I should add that the

Professor Guy Leschziner writes that he was raised in a secular household that was ‘entirely irreligious’ yet with ‘a strong sense of morality, of right and wrong’. As an eminent neurologist and a rational atheist, it’s striking that his study of the extremes of human behaviour should reach for such Biblical terms. Is there an element of ghoulishness here? Seven Deadly Sins has a structure of which David Fincher, director of the gruesome film Seven, might approve.  To zero in on the sins is undoubtedly a darkly entertaining approach, if not for the squeamish. Having been a consultant at Guy’s hospital for more than 25 years, Leschziner has seen ‘the