John Updike

John Updike has been such an enormous presence in American literature for so many years that I’ve sometimes thought we take him for granted, like the weather.

It will be a shock when he is finally gone, I thought—and so it is.

I first started reading Updike as a freshman in college. Steve Erlanger, the instructor in my expository writing class (now a reporter for the New York Times), assigned an Updike story called “Plumbing.” It was about a taciturn plumber laboring in the basement of an ill-at-ease suburban man, and about the curious invoice that arrived later, in which the tiny cost of every valve and washer and dab of solder was meticulously listed, only to be dwarfed by an enormous sum for “labor.” Nothing seemed to happen, and yet the story was strangely gripping.

The Centaur was probably the first complete Updike book I read. I remember being stunned by the exactness of some images (a copper rain gutter the color of pistachio) and the boldness of others (the cosmos of reflections in the hood of a black Buick). In the many years since, it’s been a comfort to know that a new Updike would appear at least once a year. I have read most of them, and even blogged about a couple (Terrorist and Gertrude and Claudius).

I think I saw Updike in person only once, at a memorial reading for E.B. White. I remember his slight stammer, his surprising height, and the courtly way he bent down to listen to an old lady’s compliments about his novel Roger’s Version, which had recently been published. He said, a little sheepishly I thought, that he hoped she would enjoy the rest of the book. I wondered whether he was thinking about some of the racier scenes, which the old lady might not have gotten to yet.

I will miss the feeling of opening a fresh new book by Updike, and in a way, though I never knew him personally, I will miss the man himself.