John Updike

John Updike is one of those writers I thought he died a long time ago. Then I was delighted to discover current contributions in THE NEW YORKER. I’m reading one of his novels right now. I don’t know the cosmic implications of reading someone’s work at the time of his death. I very much hope that I receive some spirit of his skill!

Updike had the career I want, and equally covetable craft and talent to match his publishing prowess. I’ve read hundreds of his short stories and found him a marksman in every one—clean, distinct lines of character, imagery, and plot all snarled into the corner of a conflict. He writes children well, and adults, and does feeling and apathy.

I’m not a natural reader, which gives me the ability of query agents to decide in three pages I’m not interested in a book. I only read a book if I can’t help it. I can’t help reading Updike. I don’t feel myself reading when I’m holding his book, it isn’t work, and I don’t know how I push other things aside to make room for him, but I do. His writing is good; it simply happens. He has the delicacy of pen to say things like in COUPLES when Piet Hanemas digs one shovelful of a hamster’s grave to make it adequate; he digs two shovelfuls to make it deep. There, you feel the sadness, the guilt, the sin against the innocence. That’s the kind of writer Updike is.

Surely if you could die of writing, John Updike had the volume to do it. I can only hope he enjoyed smoking half as much as writing. The bad news is that John Updike is dead. The good news is that he wrote so much, he will live for years with me.

Please accept my sincere condolence to all those who mourn him.