John Updike, 1932-2009

John Updike, author of the classic “Rabbit” series and frequent contributor to the New Yorker has passed away. (Read the here.)

I remember zooming through all the “Rabbit” books in my first few months living in NYC in 1996 as I waited around for temp agencies to call me for work, getting four decades of American social history from the point of view of Updike’s troubled main character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom as he struggles with responsibility, infidelity, being a father, and somehow managing to never really grow up.

From the NYT:

”He was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man’s interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it ‘‘to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.’’ Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector’s ‘‘chuckling whir’’ or look to the stars and observe that ‘‘the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.’‘

jamesisrael posted to Articles I've Recently Read on January 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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