John Updike, who died yesterday at the age of 76, filled his supersized oeuvre with novels, short stories, memoirs, poems, literary criticism, art criticism, and even travel writing.
Visiting the Caribbean for his psoriasis, he wrote trenchant "Letters from Anguilla," full of history and politics, for The New Yorker, and thus distinguished himself as one of the few writers drawn to that region for the sun who didn't write about the sun. His four-page essay "Venezuela for Visitors," which appears in the anthology Bad Trips, is a model of succinct and penetrating prose.
He also wrote a hilarious parody of On the Road, "On the Sidewalk," in the overheated voice of a little boy riding a tricycle. In interviews he gently criticized Kerouac and the Beats for shirking adult responsibilities. "I didn't think we could all go on the road," he told Terry Gross in an old interview I just heard a few minutes ago on NPR. "If we were all on the road, nothing would get done."
The quotidian was his subject; one of his aims, he once said, was to glorify the commonplace. And his novels are so steeped in a sense of place that they give the familiar an aura of the exotic: Rabbit's Pennsylvania, which Updike once called "the soft doughy center of America," and then, in the later novels, his Florida - those bright, yawning retirement sections of the state which Updike captured better than most of our homegrown novelists do.
One year in the early '90s Updike came to the Miami book fair. I took a then recent copy of Boulevard, in which he had a poem and I had a "Letter from Poland." After his talk I handed him the magazine to sign, noting that we were co-contributors.
"To Thomas Swick," he wrote, and then below it: "John Updike." Then he drew a small bracket to the right of both our names and wrote alongside it: "In this issue!" A gesture at once quick-witted and generous.
