Yesterday The Christian Science Monitor printed a piece titled “My ‘Updike year’—why I appreciate the man more now than ever” in its Books/Chapter & Verse section. In it, Danny Heitman writes that he had made it a point to read as many of John Updike’s books as he could in 2015, but, being a slow reader, he “managed to read only a fraction of the Updike canon, poking around mostly in the personal essays and criticism collected in a half a dozen volumes, including Odd Jobs, Hugging the Shore and Picked-up Pieces.”
About the experience, he writes, “What I remember most vividly from my year of Updike isn’t a particular subject or turn of phrase; he wrote about everything from baseball to cemeteries to the postal service with precision, wit, and a mastery of language that defies easy summary. No, the most abiding memory of my Updike year is the heroic moderation of the man—his quiet insistence on teasing out an insight with subtlety and grace, never raising his voice. . . .
“That voice continues to be a tonic for me as I negotiate the noise of the headlines, the extremism of the political culture, the venom-tinged pronouncements of the Twittersphere. Updike’s been gone for seven years now, but his work endures, and we need it now more than ever.”
Heitman is a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana and the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
Good column. I did something of the sort beginning in mid-2009, determined to read “all” of John Updike. It took me almost two years, and I read all of his published prose (his poetry is still on the “to do” list). As Heitman says, Updike is not about a narrow topical niche despite its focus (mostly) on a few geographic American locations and its setting in the second half of the 20th Century. He did try his hand at some other times and places, and a little fantasy. And the non-fiction – the reviews, essays, art appreciation, were, to me, unexpected and almost overwhelming (despite the fact that I had read him regularly in The New Yorker). Not only did Updike’s book reviews provide me with a new list of fiction to pursue on my literary journey, but his non-fiction as a whole is a separate source into the mind of a brilliant, kind, genuine mind and heart. Updike will indeed be appreciated even more as the years go by, I am certain.