I wrote about John Updike in The Way of the WASP. I went through a phase of reading him wall-to-wall. It cooled off, but I still go back to his comedies of damnation (Roger’s Version and The Witches of Eastwick), and his book about his Jewish alter ego, Bech: A Book. (Don’t think there is such a thing as a hilarious bibliography? Bech: A Book has one). His first book on Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, Run, is also fine, and there are good things in the Rabbit series, though it runs thin as it goes. His African fantasia, The Coup, is also definitely worth it. His short story “Pigeon Feathers” is endlessly anthologized, deservedly so; some of the stories in Too Far to Go are also good.

But even in the failures there are good things. The Centaur is an early novel, crippled by a phony mythological structure; but the evocation of small-city Pennsylvania (Reading, I believe) is wonderful.

Fashion is cruel and time sorts, but I believe he has left us valuable things. R.I.P.