Member John McTavish recently published a review-essay of Adam Begley’s biography that also considers Updike’s spirituality.

In “The Spirit of Updike,” which appeared in the Culture section in the online version of The United Church Observer—which, according to its masthead, is “the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world”—McTavish notes that “faith was more than a pleasurable habit for Updike. It was an antidote to ‘existential terror,’ as Begley puts it. Updike himself admitted as much in his memoir Self-Consciousness: ‘Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible.'”

“Religion is virtually omnipresent in Updike’s work,” McTavish writes. “But this doesn’t mean that Updike’s fiction forces a Christian message on the reader. On the contrary, he always believed that his basic duty to God was to write the most truthful and fullest books he could. ‘I don’t want to write tracts, to be more narrow in my fiction than the world itself is; I try not to subject the world to a kind of cartoon theology which gives predictable answers,’ he once reflected. Fallen clergy, self-centered philanderers: no one escaped Updike’s penetrating eye.

“Perhaps Updike’s finest religious story is ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ about a teenage boy’s quest for faith amid panic over mortality,” McTavish concludes. “The awesome complexity of the humble pigeon’s feathers distills Updike’s own philosophy of writing: ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due,’ as he phrased it; to celebrate reality, both human and divine.'”