I was hoping to post the following (very) roundabout appreciation of Updike’s latest novel a few days ago, but I’ve been kinda busy the last few days clearing the decks before tomorrow’s trip to Bologna. I’ll be meeting up with some fellow Three Monkeys scribes and college friends. Nothing out of the normal, just your usual meeting of coevals in their mid-thirties as they come to terms with their thwarted ambitions over several carafes of inexpensive plonk. Or at least that’s the plan… The news that Electronic Arts is going to start paying its employees overtime pay could be a watershed for the software industry. Traditionally, working insane hours were considered part-and-parcel of so-called “crunch time”: the period of intense toil, often lasting months, in the run-up to release. Developers tolerated the unsocial shifts in exchange for cold pizza, free soft drinks, and the prospect of stock options. Now, more than five years after the Nasdaq bubble popped, EA workers have decided to lobby for some remuneration now rather than wait for jam tomorrow.To segue rather drastically into a peripherally connected theme, this latest development in the software industry wouldn’t surprise Owen Mackenzie, hero of John Updike’s latest (his 21st!) novel: Villages. Mackenzie, whose education and subsequent career — spanning from the 1950s to the near present — encompassed both the technical and the sexual (rather more of the later than the former), looks back over his life from the vantage of affluent retirement and impending mortality. He does not seem to hanker after his renounced vocation: “Owen arrived in his new village as a mysteriously comfortable stranger, who had filched a little fortune from the early stages of an increasingly less exotic business. He was superstitiously viewed as a kind of alchemist, but he knew that the alchemy of Babbage and Turing, Eckert and Mauchly and Von Neumann had long since become mere chemistry, a province of dronelike quantifiers and disagreeable smells[…]In engineering as in the arts, the dawn time, before all but a few are still asleep to the possibilities, is the time for leaps of creation. The computer’s engineering marvels, like those of the automobile earlier in the departed century, are buried in a landslide of common use: any bank teller can summon up currency quotations from Hong Kong, just as any auto driver can push on the pedal for more gas.”Although this particular drone works (or at least hopes to work again!) in the IT industry, the languid survey above seems to strike a chord. Despite the increasingly shrill advocates who claim that the revolution is just beginning, there is a sneaking suspicion that work in “computers” may soon be seen as being as humdrum and blue-collar as that of assembly-line worker. Then again, car workers used to have unions (and actually, the pay isn’t bad.) But this is probably not the kind of future someone like Paul Graham would envision. Updike’s latest opus has received a critical kicking from the usual quarters (surprise, surprise, the NYT’s Michiko Kakutani hated it!). Yet whether it was the fluidity of his writing that lulled me, or that the sort of detached pessimism displayed above struck me as a kind of weary wisdom, I shamelessly enjoyed this book. The Economist denounced it by huffing “…it is hard to say whether the world of letters has been changed in the slightest by its publication.”I’d counter that occasionally (quite often perhaps) you’re quite happy to consume a work that does not shake the establishment to the core. There’s something to be said, after all, for a slickly constructed bourgeois entertainment. Furthermore, if you choose to heap such opprobrium on a writer of Updike’s stature, what ammunition have you left to take down the Dan Browns or James Pattersons of this world?