Books by two essayists go head-to-head in a Los Angeles Times review, and St. Louis' own William Gass seems to get the better of the late John Updike.

The paper's book critic, David L. Ulin, compares Gass' "Life Sentences" to Updike's "Higher Gossip" and says:

Updike is talking about politics there as much as aesthetics, but more to the point is that innate conservatism again, the sense that a piece of writing can, or should, only do so much. And yet, why wouldn't we want a review to stake out a position, to frame a territory, to fire a shot across the bow? More to the point, how could it not? This is what Gass understands: that criticism, like literature, is, or ought to be, a subversive art.

Ulin also says, "Updike was our most hit-or-miss major writer; even his best works are testaments to a kind of middle-class timidity, a reticence about the wilder edges of the world. "

Of Gass, he says, "Gass, like Updike, has long balanced the roles of critic and novelist, although with him, there's a real divide in the writing — the criticism is fluid, pointed, exuberant, while the fiction is too schematic, too representative of theory and not enough of flesh and blood."