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Slate Bids Updike AdieuEditors and writers remember John Updike.

Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 3:24 PM ET

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I wasn't surprised that I had heard nothing back from him by the time we went to press. The piece had been just right; I had been totally obsessive. So why—on the very day the boxes of fresh TNRs arrived in the office, his essay announced on the cover—did a fat envelope also arrive, with Updike's blue-inked return-address stamp in the left-hand corner? It was plainly stuffed with his galleys. What error hadn't I spotted? However tiny it was, I wouldn't forgive myself. I tore open the envelope in a panic that comes back as I write this: Neatly, Updike had marked up each page with changes, big and small.

He not only forgave me but made fun of himself as a fusser who would have yet another chance to preserve an even more final version in the collection of essays he was planning. John Updike was "an incorrigible retoucher," as he noted of Degas in a later piece (if only he'd warned me earlier). The ease and the grace in his work went hand-in-hand with meticulous care. The result was a truly rare generosity with words.

Ben Yagoda, author
Some time in my teens, I became aware that there was such a thing as a writer. Shortly thereafter, John Updike became my idea of what a writer was. He remained so throughout his life, and he remains so now. In my college years, I became something of an Updike buff; I remember my excitement when my college library's copy of Buchanan Dying appeared on the shelves. That state of extreme fandom faded, but not my great admiration for his intelligence, his taste, his diction, his sentences, his work ethic, and his work.

Updike was, of course, the quintessential New Yorker writer. In researching a history of the magazine, I discovered that his percentage of acceptances—somewhere in the mid-to-high 90s—outstripped all other contributors' to roughly the degree Art Tatum played faster than all other pianists. He graciously answered, by mail, my questions about his experiences with the magazine. Do I have to add that his typewritten letters and postcards were composed with insight and care? But the quote that sticks in my mind on this sad day is from a 1960 letter I came upon in the magazine's archives, written to Updike from his editor and great friend William Maxwell. "From the very beginning," Maxwell said, "I have been so confident of your ability to paddle your own canoe—so positive that the day would come when you would have to go to Sweden and make a speech in white tie and tails—that I have allowed myself the fatherly feeling of pride in your career, but not the equally paternal feeling of having had much to do with it." And what is up with the Nobel Committee? Among its many missteps over time, its ignoring of John Updike may be the most indefensible.

Stephen Metcalf, critic at large, Slate
John Updike had talent, he was prolific, and he sold a lot of books—the three things posterity cares least about. Borges once said something canny to V.S. Naipaul about literary fame: "The important thing is the image you create of yourself in other people's minds. That image—as with Byron—may in the end be more important than the work."

What image has Updike created in other people's minds? He chronicled the horny undercurrents of suburban normality. He loaded even the most banal detail with writerly elegance. He wrote about being white, Protestant, and male, as these began to surface as suspicious facts worthy of inspection, rather than sources for a universally aspirational norm. He created the last naïve Everyman, Rabbit Angstrom, a unit of close to no account—and yet the protagonist of the great American midcentury epic.

The work is so profuse, the image still indistinct. And yet almost any page induces at least one swoon. I hold in my hand The Early Stories: 1953-1975 and open almost randomly to:

"But when has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just that—a pursuit. Death and its adjutants tax each transaction. What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted." What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted—like a formula, it captures a structure of reality so elegantly that it is beyond comprehension that the thought ever lay beyond comprehension. Together with a million such moments, an idea of Updike will coalesce—the last literary gentleman, chronicling the end of the great white male?

Tom Perrotta, author
Updike's Rabbit novels form a genuine American epic—I can't think of any contemporary fiction that works so well on the microcosmic level. So much of our recent history, for better and worse, is reflected in Harry Angstrom's experience—not just the sexual revolution, but Vietnam, the racial and generational upheavals of the '60s, feminism, the gas crisis, the fat years of the '80s, even changing attitudes about food and healthy living. I remember talking to a woman friend of mine, a true veteran of the '60s, telling her how much I loved Rabbit, Run. "It's amazing," I said. "The marriage actually broke up over a blow job." "Believe me," she said, "a lot of marriages broke up over that blow job." A hundred years from now, if people want to know what it was like to be a middle-class white American in the second half of the 20^th century, they could do a lot worse than reading the four novels Updike wrote about this flawed Everyman who, like the country he embodied, always wanted a little more than what was good for him.

Emily Yoffe, author, Slate columnist
My parents kept their dirty books under their bed, and when I was a teenager, I discovered John Updike's Couples there. It was a scandalously explicit book at the time (1968) about the incessant, adulterous couplings of the dissatisfied citizens of a small Massachusetts town. Since my parents had a marriage that could have come out of an Updike novel and I lived in a small Massachusetts town, I read the book not so much as a novel but a guide to the adults around me. I haven't looked at it in the 40 years since, but so precise and vivid was Updike's prose that I still remember his description of a tongue licking papery, freckled skin. Updike's writing about sex didn't make me want to have sex. Instead it made me feel that I would be compelled to—that sex was something inevitable, exciting, and awful.