I’m sorry to hear of Updike’s death. I have mixed feelings about him as a writer who squandered his talents for finely observed and meticulously narrated detail with two great mistakes.

First, he wrote much too much, so that many of his novels are slapped-together pastiches, meandering around plotlessly, of whatever was on Updike’s mind at any particular moment (cheating on his wife, his divorce, etc.).

Second, he stuffed the books with much too much purple-prose sex, the kind that’s gotten him at least one award in the “Bad Sex Writing” contest. His 1968 novel Couples, a ginormous best-seller for that reason, put him on a 40-year roll in both bad directions: no discernible plot but a ton of soft-core (or, actually, hard-core) porn. Furthermore, the protagonists in Updike’s fiction are always exactly the same age as he, so in the later works (such as Rabbit at Rest) where the protagonists are advanced in years, the extensively detailed sex is of the “Eeeew” variety (in The Widows of Eastwick, his last novel, which I haven’t read, all the sex takes place between decrepit 70-plus-year-olds).

So Updike wrote some good stuff and a lot of bad stuff. The Coup is probably his best novel because it’s not about weak, self-indulgent, sex-obsessed Americans exactly Updike’s age, but about Obama-pere-style African polygamists and the goofy American college girls who become Wife #2 or #3. Many of his stories are also good because the short form imposes discipline. The Rabbit series is pretty good overall as a chronicle of American softness and decline in a land of plenty. The rest? Not so much. I liked Roger’s Version until it struck me that Updike actually approved of the abortion arranged by his middle-aged hero having an adulterous affair with his own niece.

As for Updike’s Christian faith, it seemed to have been informed by an idiosyncratic reading of Martin Luther’s famous aphorism “simul justus et peccator” (man is both righteous, thanks to Christ’s atonement, and a miserable sinner, thanks to Adam’s fall). The protagonists of Updike’s novels tend to be simul justus et peccator to the nth degree. They can’t resist their impulses. The typical Updike hero is a married man, often with children, who has just got to, is compelled to, not only sleep with some alluring neighbor (or the church organist if he’s a minister), but to ditch his wife and abandon his children (Couples, Marry Me). Or sleep with his daughter-in-law (Rabbit at Rest). Or his niece (Roger’s Version). Or, often as not, do all of the above in some sequence or other. That’s the “peccator” aspect. The “justus” aspect is: I’m in love! In Updike’s best novels (The Coup, Bech, Witches of Eastwick), he declined to indulge in this sort of sentimental self-justification and took a more detached and sharper view of human failings and foibles.

–Charlotte Allen is author of The Human Christ.