John Updike
Has died. The best American novelist since 1945.
A radio interview from 1984.
I read The Coup a year or two ago. Marvelous pitch-perfect comedy, set in a place like Nigeria in the 60s as big oil came on the scene.
A fool in the Times today, while recommending Updike reading, suggested that people might skip the second of the four Harry Angstrom novels — Rabbit Redux — in my humble opinion his single greatest novel. Â Set in 1969, written soon after, now reading as a great historical novel furthermore filled with his intense, precise evocations of inner and outer worlds …
Here’s a bit from an upcoming book of his final poetry:
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!â€
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.â€
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
As if to emphasize the loss, I find myself reading The Da Vinci Code. The gargantuan bestseller.  The writing: embarassing garbage. The thinking: adolescent. What we’ve become.
Also today: The Washington Post announces it will junk Book World, its Sunday book review section.
