Updike, R.I.P.

Just got the word that John Updike is dead.  Too young — 76 isn’t even up to the life expectancy of an American child born these days (though it still puts him just a skosh ahead of the white male number).

Updike was never one of my obligatory reads — I didn’t race to buy each new novel as it came out.  But he was one of the real stalwarts within the American Republic of Letters for the last half century.  He did it all:  short fiction, long, essays, criticism, poetry.  If I sometimes detected circumcision envy in his suburban writing, I loved his touch, his ability to catch emotion in a scene, a scene in a few beautifully carved sentences.  He was a smart writer, and a very funny one when he chose to be.

RIP.

Image:  Albrecht Durer, “A Young Hare,” 1502

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