John Updike died a week ago today (Feb. 3), as we all know. Immediately, a clutch of writers cranked up the appreciation machine. Here's what some wrote:
"It was Updike's task, while not denying the repressiveness, to celebrate what was valuable about life in the village." William Pritchard in the Boston Globe. (Feb. 1)
"He was a strongly visual writer. . . Writing his powers could be as focused as Kodachrome." -- Karen Long in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. (Feb. 1)
"Updike achieved his greatest fame as a novelist, but it could be argued that the short story was his greatest strength." -- John Mark Eberhart in the Kansas City Star. (Feb. 1).
"Truth be told, Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, something valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work or rococco flourishes across pages." -- Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer. (Feb. 1)
I'll weigh in Feb. 8, aiming to capture the writer's progression from youthful imitations of older writers to the developed adult sensibility of a long life.
Posted
Feb 03 2009, 05:05 PM
by
Bob Hoover