New Year’s means resolutions, and columnist Danny Heitman shared his with Christian Science Monitor readers:
“My New Year’s resolution: read more John Updike.”
“He appeals to me because, quite frankly, I finally have a decent chance of finishing one Updike book before another comes out. . . . What we now have, finally, is the prospect of seeing Updike whole. That’s a territory I’d like to explore the next 12 months, continuing a journey started many years ago,” writes Heitman, who said he began reading Updike as a college student.
“Updike’s acute perception—his ability to record the inner life of his childhood with such luminous detail [in Self-Consciousness]—was a small miracle to me. He seemed like a writer I should get to know.”
Heitman says that by reading all of Updike he’s anticipating the chance “to see an author grow on the page as you visit his early books, the middle ones, the later ones that top off a career. And there’s the promise of intimacy, too—the kind of closeness that develops, like any friendship, according to the number of hours one is willing to invest in it.”
Exactly what I did beginning with John Updike’s passing in 2009. I more or less followed his published works chronologically, including the six volumes of reviews, essays, the art gallery review books, and the collected short stories. What Mr. Heitman says is certainly correct – one becomes intimate with a mind that has produced such a wide and deep oeuvre. I had first encountered Updike when my college freshman English course assigned The Poorhouse Fair, then read him over the years in The New Yorker, and then the Rabbit books. After that it was off to the races.