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I had trouble getting into John Updike's writing. As an undergrad, I did the thing where I tried to search out my identity through literature, and this led me (scarily) first to Bukowski, then (understandably) to Jonathan Safran Foer, then (scarily, again, in terms of personality, even though he's indisputably a fantastic writer) to Philip Roth. Right now, for the record, I'm hovering around Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kafka.

Anyway, Updike was kind of impenetrable for me. I shrugged at "A & P." I made it twenty pages into Rabbit, Run before declaring it crap. At first I assumed it was because he was a bad writer. I'm still slowly learning that, about ninety-eight percent of the time, authors regarded as great are usually great. Then I assumed I didn't like him because I was Jewish, and Updike's writing is so...not Jewish at all. Finally, a writing teacher (guru) of mine recommended that I check out Bech: A Book.

It fit right into my post-Jewish-but-not self-identity kick. A lot of people surmise that Updike wrote it as a reaction to all the attention Jewish authors - Roth, Bellow, I.B. Singer, Nawman Mailer, half of J.D. Salinger - were getting at the time. What it is, is a collection of stories about a semi-broke, semi-womanizing, wholly neurotic Jewish writer named Henry Bech. And it's pretty hilarious. My copy of the book is lost at either my mom or dad's house - I'm sure of this fact - so I don't have it for easy perusal, but I remember one scene where Bech smokes up and soon vomits (people say Updike wrote the present moment better than anyone else...anyone say 'Michael Phelps'?); in the faux-introduction, written by Bech, he refers to the collection as 'a little jeu of a book.' (It prompted a number of sequels.)

Anyway, this was my gateway to Rabbit, Redux, which I finished, and liked. The end.

What all this amounts to is to show that I am not the guy to even attempt writing an Updike retrospective in the wake of his death last week. So here are a few links to some nice pieces that summarize the man and his letters.

The Toronto Star: "For John Updike and me, it would always be winter..."

The Guardian: "My subject," remarked the American novelist John Updike, who has died at the age of 76, "is the American Protestant small-town middle class."

Esquire: "I met my wife through John Updike..."

Esquire, again: "Say it — say "Updike" — and you can almost smell the pipe tobacco, feel the tweed..."

The New Yorker: "John Updike (1932-2009) once said that his first publication and nearly sixty-year-long relationship with this magazine was the great professional event of his life.."

My favorite so far is Charles McGrath's for The Times, because its first couple paragraphs prompt a little game of purely speculative, unanswerable true-and-false.

1.    "Updike...was our Trollope and our Proust both"

2.    "Though a brilliant man, he was not a novelist of ideas."

3.    He was able "to describe, with an exactitude bordering on love, how the world looked and what it felt like to make your way in it." (Ed - the part about 'bordering on love' is, I will say, magnificently true. Though I'm not his closest reader, it's easy to tell Updike loved his subjects, no matter how awful they were)

4.    "He was the great chronicler of middle-class America, and hundreds of years from now, if people still read, they will read the Rabbit books to learn what that perplexing age, the 20th century, was really like."

Answers, anyone?