In a Commonweal article inspired by Adam Begley’s recent biography, Rand Richards Cooper considers “The Charms of the Conqueror: How John Updike Made It Look Easy.”

“His writing flickers with the hope that the world was created, and thus merits the devotion of attention (by fictional characters) and description (by Updike himself),” he writes.

“The Rabbit novels are crammed with the trivia of American life down the decades, and their accumulating excess reminds us that far from being ‘untroubled,’ Updike wrote from a condition of spiritual urgency.”

“Having read Begley’s book, I shouldn’t be surprised that Updike wrote to the very end; still, I find myself awed by the courage it must have taken to sit in the fearful presence of death and write . . . a sonnet?”

Cooper concludes, “After someone we love dies, his or her voice stays with us, fresh and close, for years; we keep expecting the phone to ring with that voice on the other end; we experience frank disbelief, and renewed sorrow, at the idea that its owner truly is gone forever. It’s not much different with a writer one has loved. Keep company with a writer, in many books over decades of your life, and you grow accustomed to his presence; you hear his voice in much the same way you hear a friend’s or a sibling’s. Updike in his early years imitated other writers’ styles, channeling first Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and later Salinger and Nabokov—praising them by imitating their voices before eventually settling in to play his own exquisitely tuned instrument. Reading his prose in this life-and-art-affirming biography, I hear him vivid as ever, and miss him all over again.”