Tom Green

I'm not a good enough writer to express how I feel about the work of John Updike, who died this week.

Neither are quite a few authors of the tributes I've been reading.

But I enjoyed this selection of thoughts from writers in The New Yorker.

Including from Paul Theroux:

"He helped us see. I regard him as a master, appreciative in ways that enlarged his vision and made his writing sing.

The completeness of this vision is astonishing. So I’m surprised, even a little shocked, by the belittling tone of the obituaries: the talk of how one book was weaker than another, the sorting out, the awarding of marks.

This misses the point: his work is all of a piece, capturing the life forces of America, a half century of the social, the political, the marital; of solitude and intimacy; and passion—the human libido is often warmly throbbing in Updike’s fiction. "

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