SOURCE: “It Was Sad,” in New Yorker, October 14, 1996, pp. 94-98.

In the following excerpted review, Updike discusses the Titanic disaster and Bainbridge's fictional recreation of the tragedy in Every Man for Himself.

The R.M.S. (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic, whose sinking, more than eighty-four years ago, made the biggest news splash of the new century, still generates headlines. The discovery of the wreck, in 1985, three hundred and seventy miles southeast of Newfoundland and two and a half miles below the surface of the Atlantic, by a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer, revivified a fascination that had never quite died. Though the leader of the expedition, Robert Ballard, denounced salvage of the wreck, and placed a plaque on the Titanic's stern declaring it “a sacred resting place,” his French partners in...