"You're too young to understand John Updike."

[Mike 03]

Today John Updike died of lung cancer. I am going to miss him as much as I miss Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Mailer and Joseph Heller.

He was my favorite or second favorite writer when I finally saw the light as a Junior in High School and began to read for the pure enjoyment of reading. "The World According to Garp" was the first book that hypnotized me, but I saw how much my mother was raving about "Rabbit is Rich" and I somehow managed to pick that book up and start reading it. It was the third novel in the Rabbit series, and it was the book that finally won Updike the Pulitzer.

That is an astonishing book, as are "Rabbit Redux," and the (IMO) vastly underappreciated "Roger's Version," as well as the Bech series, "Witches of Eastwick," and a great many of his non-fiction essays and stabs at literary and art criticism.

But nobody could understand how a seventeen year old could relate to a character like Rabbit, a middle-aged and failed car salesman with a ne'er do well son and a fixation on his friend's wife! I don't blame them. Maybe it is strange. But I simply found these books funny as hell, mesmerizing, and in a touching way very elgiac, or poignant. When I read his work, I felt like I was reading the comic obituary of something important to me, even though it would take me a few years to figure out what this was, and why his books touched me so much.

I actually got spanked by my first fiction teacher who accused me writing "bad John Updike"! He hugely influenced my first convulsive, failed attempts at writing.

His fiction X-rayed the American Middle Class. He understood the failure of the American Dream, and the dark side of suburbia.

Dear John Updike, your fans are thinking of you tonight. What a sad loss. But what a legacy you leave us. And what a tremendous writer you were.

[annabanana]

1. He had a way of making the odd seem reasonable, and the

reasonable, odd. A remarkable gift...

R.I.P.

[infidel dog]

2. RIP John. Another light goes out in the darkening house of American Literature.

[bergs]

3. A significant loss indeed.

Apart from my favorite of his novels (Brazil), my favorite piece of his was Hub Bids Kid Adieu, one of the most spectacular pieces of baseball writing ever committed to print:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml

"Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities."