Earlier today, Victoria Zhuang, a Harvard Crimson staffer, posted a tribute to John Updike in the guise of a reading recommendation:  “Staff Rec: ‘Higher Gossip’; Tribute to a Prose Poet.” 

After sharing the emotion she felt upon hearing of Updike’s death, she calls the posthumously published Higher Gossip “a kind of chattering astride the grave” and notes, “The incredible thing about Updike, a quality rarely native to any other contemporary writer, is that his unmistakable prodding touch is discernible in each miscellaneous fragment, however stray. . . .

“Updike was fascinated with everything in the world, a veritable humanist astronaut. He is also a humorous observer, though a supremely self-conscious one whose strains of narcissism and misogyny, present here as elsewhere in his work, are probably only rescued by his being John Updike.”