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.”

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.”