H Hamilton £25 pp238

Art criticism can be such an enjoyable pursuit that it’s no wonder the professionals like to hog it for themselves. Still, their industrial monopoly needs challenging from time to time, especially since some of the most dazzling art criticism of the last 150 years or so has come from writers who dared to cross the picket lines. Poets and novelists have often excelled at the form — Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound — and the tradition of professional trespass is still vital on both sides of the Atlantic. Over here, writers as various as Julian Barnes and Iain Sinclair have carried out some dashing moonlight raids; in America, the full-timers have been kept on their toes by, among others, the late Guy Davenport, the poet John Ashbery and, most obviously, John Updike. Their critical approaches have been as wildly dissimilar as their prose styles, and only one thing really unites their efforts: unlike a lot of the salaried types, they write essays that can be read for pleasure rather than penance.

Still Looking, Updike’s latest collection of art criticism, confirms the impression left by its predecessor, Just Looking, that the American novelist is among the most agreeable of moonlighters. As something of an artist manqué himself — he spent a year at the Ruskin School in Oxford — he approaches works of art with a hint of wistful, road-not-taken hankering, a fundamental softness for the medium that makes him slow to chide and swift to bless (not always a virtue in a critic, to be sure). He also shows an admirably retentive memory for images, which provides him with comparisons as apt as they can be unexpected: a crowd scene by George Bellows suggests “the heavenly thronging of a Tiepolo”; a Boston street scene by Childe Hassam “compares favorably . . . with Gustave Caillebotte”; a Maine scene by Marsden Hartley is found to have “the overlapping ‘stitch’ stroke of the Italian Giovanni Segantini”. Updike, plainly, is an amateur critic only in the sense that he writes from love. He has looked hard, and thought carefully.

In fact, his performances are so accomplished and charming that it seems worth putting up a bit of an initial struggle against his smooth seductions, and to point out a shortcoming or two. The first is a simple matter of format. There are 19 essays in Still Looking, spread out over not much more than 200 heavily and handsomely illustrated pages: precious little room to dig deep or range wide, and a lot of temptation to set down swift, arresting generalities. The subject of almost every essay was dictated to Updike by chance — these are mainly reviews of particular exhibitions held on the East Coast between 1990 and 2004 — and such unity as the book possesses stems from the nationality of the artists (all of them American) and the bees in Updike’s bonnet (some of them America-boosting). What this means in practice is that we hear far too little about the likes of, say, Thomas Eakins, James McNeill Whistler and Jackson Pollock, and rather too much about the far less commanding presences of Madsen Hartley, Arthur Dove, Elie Nadelman and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Cramped formats make Updike terse where, one senses, he would really have liked to be expansive. His essay on Eakins — one of the finest in the book, and a powerful argument for the case that Eakins was a remarkable talent, perhaps a giant — bristles with sharp touches: “Eakins is never unthinking; this is his strength and his weakness. Our sense of an intellect exerted is not always balanced by the sense of a moment captured . . . Discomfort and a grieving inwardness distinguish the best of (his) portraits.” Spot on; and you crave some extended commentary on, say, Eakins’s strange and darkly magnificent Portrait of Dr Gross (1875). Sadly, Updike largely confines himself to the (true) remark that this canvas invites the unsuspecting viewer to gaze up the rectum of a dead man.

That anal note is all the more disconcerting in that Updike’s typical conduct here tends to the demure and his tastes to the small-C conservative. There is even a note of jingoism, or at least patriotic boosterism, from time to time. If an artist runs up the stars and stripes, Updike salutes. He declares himself irritated by the hectoring sociological notes — “captious wall-captions” — of a show about American impressionism and realism, whose curators go out of their way to scold the dead artists for not being sufficiently proletarian in their loyalties. Updike is right to be nettled by this trendy guff, which makes it all the more surprising that he can be tempted guff-wards himself, as when he spots lesbianism in Winslow Homer’s Undertow (1886) and male homoeroticism in Copley’s The Death of Major Pierson (1784) — a picture, by the way, in which the most obviously fascinating detail is that of the black British soldier firing an avenging shot. Bah, humbug.

But that is quite enough carping. Still Looking is full of delights: images to gorge on, precisely calibrated phrases to hold in the mind until they yield their full content. Updike is eloquent and exact on, among others, Edward Hopper, whose penchant for teetering on the brink of narrative he catches beautifully, and whose canvases he terms “models of therapeutic reserve”. In full spate, Updike permits himself a licence few professional art critics would risk. Of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, he writes, “One can imagine the barber pole and the fire hydrant about to break into a courtship dance. The chorus line of apartment windows may suddenly lift its curtains in musical union...”

Fanciful? Absolutely. Memorable? And how. Whimsical caprices of this order would almost certainly get you drummed out of any art critics’ association, but what Updike shows, triumphantly, is that a supposedly outmoded way of evoking art’s more elusive, recondite pleasures is still alive and well and living in America.

SNOB APPEAL

One artist Updike, is keen to defend is Whistler. Quoting Ruskin on his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, where the critic accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”, Updike deftly dismisses the language as “snobbish and overwrought” and Ruskin, who was sued by Whistler, as “too mentally unstable to appear in court for his own defence”.

Available at the Books First price of £22.50 on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy