John Updike was a writer who enjoyed both critical and popular success, and the range of people his writing “spoke to” is great.

Witness the latest ruminations on on Updike’s The Maples Stories, a fictional account of his first marriage, which come from Gary Thorne, the play-by-play announcer for baseball’s Baltimore Orioles.

His takeaway? “So the end does not define the marriage, the millions of moments do. Those moments are what Updike brings to life in each of these stories.

“Since they are in sequence, we see the lives of the Maples as it happened—all those mundane moments that perhaps were not so mundane after all.

“Updike, like the moments, writes in a reality we easily understand and feel. The exceptional growth of his writing abilities is seen since the sequence of stories is not only true for the marriage years, but for his writing as well.”

“Hitting the Books with Gary Thorne: The Maples Stories“