Prolific author left formidable legacy

JOHN Updike was, as so few major writers are, a comforting presence.

JOHN Updike was, as so few major writers are, a comforting presence.

Over six decades, his short stories, novels, poems, reviews, essays and art criticism poured forth with such seeming effortlessness that his oeuvre came to be taken for granted: faded, like some Persian rug, into the pattern of the times.

In later years especially, critics and readers began to yawn at his prolific output, which they saw as evidence of mediocrity rather than a sustained achievement without parallel in modern American letters.

Colleagues and competitors such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth touted an extreme, Romantic version of authorial excess. Their efforts recalled William Faulkner's overweening ambition, Ernest Hemingway's masculine endeavour, F. Scott Fitzgerald's battles with the booze.

Updike, by contrast, was courtly, even-tempered and sober even in his pleasures.

Wrongly informed that his friend had died in a car accident three decades ago, John Cheever wrote, simply: "He was a prince."

It was Updike's gentlemanly cast, his clubbable nature and his cool professionalism that damned him in the eyes of a reading community whose tastes were formed by, or even in angry reaction to, those roistering geniuses mentioned above.

But it would be an error to mistake Updike's fluency and ease for what Graham Greene called "the fatal facility of the second-rate". Updike was a superbly gifted prose stylist. Of all Vladimir Nabokov's literary children, he had the greatest right to be named heir apparent.

Strip away the Trollopean output, the honourably failed literary experiments, the late waning of his powers and we are left with some of the best short stories of the American century, half a dozen enduring long fictions (The Centaur, published in 1963, strikes me as his early masterpiece; Roger's Version, from 1986, his late one) and the surpassing achievement of the Rabbit Novels.

It was with Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, alter ego of an Updike who never made it to college, that the author found his ideal foil: a deeply flawed man whose life, spanning the immense, spoiled promise of post-war America, could be enfolded in an exquisite mandarin prose that did not diminish, rather exalted, his essential innocence, exuberance and rough-grained nobility.