Updike - A Few Words

The more literary regions of the blogosphere will be - or already are - ablaze with talk of John Updike today, and rightly so. I have little to add, except to say that he gave me some of the great reading experiences of my life, for which I shall be always thankful. He was a prose stylist like no other, at once supremely delicate and utterly ruthless, with the sharpest , most curious eye of any fiction writer of the 20th century - an artist's eye. At his best (for me, in Marry Me, rather than the overblown, overpraised Couples), he wrote of the Great Subject of the novel - adulterous love - more vividly and truly than, again, any fiction writer of the 20th century. (Huw Edwards, bless him, on the BBC News summed up his subjects as 'divorce, sex and other aspects of American life'.) Of course he wrote too much - he couldn't help himself - and of course his later works were often iffy, but a good half dozen of the novels surely deserve to live - I'd go for three of the Rabbits (not Redux), Marry Me, A Month of Sundays and Roger's Version, for starters - and several dozen of the short stories. Enough, in my book, to mark him down as one of the 20th century's greats. RIP.