Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Ah Shit

RIP John Updike.

I don't have much time to blog about this right now, but I'm kinda shocked. Updike was one of those literary lions who seemed kind of eternal, who seemed vital and vigorous even into old age. People like that, well, it kind of shocks you when they die. Love him or hate him, he left an impression on literature.




I'll take Philip Roth in the Author Dead Pool for next up to bat, sadly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a snotty undergraduate (and, heaven help me, "aspiring writer," a calling for which in the event I lacked a modicum of talent and a great deal of discipline) in the early 1970s I used to disparage Updike, knowing nothing about him other than his reputation, as a mere chronicler of suburban adultery. Then I read Museums and Women and then in short order the other extant collections (just three of them at that time), and then the novels. I subsequently learned as well, and to my cost, that suburban adultery is a more piquant and, ah, fraught subject than I appreciated at twenty. Like you, I wasn't prepared for this abrupt departure: I thought that this prodigiously gifted and prolific man had another ten years in him.

Tonight's assignment: reread "The Happiest I've Been."