Hub Fans Bid Updike Adieu

"I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him."
-- Updike, The Paris Review.

John Updike is dead. Twenty-four books of his on our shelf, all read, and he's out the door, on the street and hailing a cab.

He wrote about Bergson. He wrote about Whitman. He wrote about the strange silences of an abandoned church. He wrote about snow, Greenwich Village, and late nights. His dismantling of Henry James (this Bostonist thinks) was hilarious. He wrote about Ted. He wrote about books -- not begrudgingly, as Orwell would have done from time to time, but kindly, sympathetically, and with an eye to granting dignity where he could. He wrote of a Dog's Death. He wrote about Nabokov calling his not-yet wife to the front of the class so Nabokov could see "what a genius looked like."

And while we can't immediately speak to the entirety of his ouevre, we can say this: the breadth of his work matched with the prose he used to walk where he did -- and how far he did -- is what placed him in as strong a position as we find him today.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Postcript: Links -- Bat Segundo Interview, Joyce Carol Oats on Updike, New York Review of Books Archive, New Yorker Archive.