Roth/Updike

> (with the possible exception of Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison) no one else in America was writing at the same level

I believe the greater literary community would flip that and say no one else was writing at the level of Morrison & Bellow and perhaps Roth & Updike were at that level. And Updike’s work does not age nearly as well as the work of the other three.

> What Roth didn't say but could have was that while Updike's best sentences may have been better than Roth's, he also wrote many more bad ones.

That sounds right. The author could have added that most of Updike's best sentences are in his stories, not his novels.