Sad Literary News

John Updike has died at age 76. Very sad -- and, to me, anyway -- very sudden. He had lung cancer, and I don't know whether it was kept a secret or I just wasn't following his life that closely. It seemed that he was vibrant and would go on writing forever.

I can't say his fictional sensibility was my favorite, but he was inarguably and widely brilliant, and it's hard to imagine a larger loss -- tangible or symbolic -- for American literature. Like Joyce Carol Oates, his pen was mind-bogglingly prolific. Last year, I posted this paragraph by Martin Amis, in which he compares Updike and Samuel Beckett:

Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes. Whereas Updike, of course, is a psychotic Santa of volubility, emerging from one or another of his studies (he is said to have four of them) with his morning sackful of reviews, speeches, reminiscences, think-pieces, forewords, prefaces, introductions, stories, playlets and poems. Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favorite color. No problem -- but can they hang on? Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.