In a summer New York Times Book Review interview, “Cynthia Ozick: By the Book,” Ozick mentions Updike in her very first response. Asked what books are currently on her night stand, she replies,

“Nowadays my night stand is a roughly cubical archaeological mount (33 by 25 inches), long awaiting shelf space. From a middle stratum I’ve excavated the regenerative pleasures of rediscovery—all old books: John Updike’s Villages (an aching reminder of the absence of that steadily remarkable literary voice); a Library of America collection of four novels by William Dean Howells (who ought to be venerated at least as much as Willa Cather, if not more); Frank Kermode’s Pieces of My Mind (consummate reflections on subjects ranging from Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver to ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’). And from a lower lode, a pair of memoirs by two boyhood escapees from Nazified Vienna, marking Austria’s loss of a stellar composer and a questioning poet: Robert Starer’s Continuo: A Life in Music and Arthur Gregor’s A Longing in the Land. Finally, on the mound always accreting surface, a weighty volume turned upside down to conceal the face on its cover: a new biography of Adolph Hitler by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German, not yet opened. Will I read it? Will I? Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography.”

The illustration is by Jillian Tamaki.

Novelist Ian McEwan was recently interviewed for the Books/Culture section of The Observer in a piece published on Saturday, August 30, 2014:  “Ian McEwan: ‘I’m only 66—my notebook is still full of ideas.'”

Although interviewer Robert McCrum mostly asks about McEwan’s latest book, The Children Act, he also describes a moment in the interview in which McEwan evoked John Updike:

“Out of the blue he remembers interviewing the late John Updike in his final years. ‘We talked about all this,’ he recalls. ‘He told me: The older you get the less frightening death becomes.’ He frowns in puzzlement. ‘I’m not sure whether to believe him.’

“So does he believe him?

“‘No.’ A beat. ‘Do you believe those obituaries that say, ‘Died peacefully in his sleep?’ (McEwan was at Christopher Hitchens’s bedside shortly before he died.) ‘Still, wouldn’t be a bad way to go.'”

Adam Begley, in Scotland for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, gave an interview to Alan Taylor of The Herald that was assigned the somewhat titillating headline “The final sin of John Updike.”

In the long interview, which was published in the Saturday, August 9 online version, Begley covers a lot of ground and concludes that Updike had given up all but one of his vices—smoking, drinking, sleeping around. “‘It’s true, his last sin was writing,’ says Adam Begley. ‘This compulsion to take other people’s lives and use them for his own ends. Other than that, he had given up naughtiness.'”

Says Begley, “I didn’t think Updike’s biography was difficult to write because my training is in literary criticism and my inclination is towards literary criticism. What Updike offers to me is much more valuable that [Norman Mailer-esque] derring-do or political campaigns; punching one’s colleagues in the faces or biting their ears or stabbing your wife. What he did is write books that drew me to them like a magnet and stories that I could turn to.”

“The character who emerges from Begley’s book is complex and fascinating and, to a degree, elusive,” Taylor writes. “There was, for example, the public figure, who could turn on the charm as one might a light. He was studiedly polite and played the part of literary gent almost to the point of parody. By nature, Updike was also careful and cautious and conservative. For much of his life, moreover, he had a stammer and was plagued with psoriasis. And, having grown up as a single child in a family that always had to count pennies, he could never fall back on privilege.

“But there was also another side to him, observes Begley, that of the daredevil and the practical joker. As a teenager he would woo his pals with stunts, jumping on the running board of his parents’ old black Buick and steering it downhill through the open window. He was prone to tomfoolery, as if determined to draw attention to himself. He liked to leap over parking meters and would through himself downstairs as if he were part of a slapstick act. ‘So there is that contradiction in him,’ says Begley, ‘that is elemental in him and that biographers like and which they pretend they can explain, but can’t.”

Garrison Keillor, the American humorist and writer best known for hosting “A Prairie Home Companion,” has featured poems by John Updike on his website, so it’s no surprise that he thinks highly of Updike.

In an interview published today, August 7, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Keillor was asked about his literary heroes:

“John Updike for his vast ambition and the Lutheran diligence that realized it. Edward Hoagland for his style and bravery and love of the world. May Swenson, again for bravery, independence, also wit. A.J. Liebling and Roy Blount Jr. as reporters who wrote literature: You can read them over and over and over. P.G. Wodehouse for sheer elegance and invention. Robery Bly, a wonderful poet into his 80s, a great old troublemaker.”

The illustration is by Jillian Tamaki, and you can read the whole interview here:  “Garrison Keillor: By the Book”