A decent job of assessing Updike's work by Ian McEwan in The Guardian today - it fails to do him justice, but at least McEwan acknowledges that.

Some good insights.

Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.

Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size". He was clear, too, that we all sense more than we can ever put into words, and was mindful of the example of Joyce and his "great attempt to capture the way we move through life".
 
And from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right. Describing the “Rabbit” books to a new reader, one is stunned to be reminded of their apparent inconsequence: the hero isn’t a great bootlegger who gets killed, or a boy on a raft with a runaway slave, or even a suicidal small-town gent or an exotic expatriate in Spain. He doesn’t do anything grand. He’s a high-school basketball star in a dying town; he runs a Toyota dealership; he has an affair or two with a woman; he stays married; he has a hopeless son. And yet Rabbit’s small acts hold not just truth but also glamour, a mystery and glow almost Proustian.

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. "

I loved the audacity of this - a whole orchestra on stage! - and I loved the way that Stoppard integrates the orchestra into his play so effortlessly. It's playful, clever, funny and moving. 

Ecstatically received by the second house of the evening (it only runs 65 minutes). So full marks to the National for innovative programming following on from the short Pinter plays last year.

Perhaps some shorter new plays could be tried at the Cottesloe; as double-bills if necessary. I think several new works have suffered in recent years from over-stretch and would have been more successful cut down to around 70-90 minutes.

Two confessions: I've never seen a zombie film (I switched off Shaun Of The Dead after about ten  minutes) and I expected Dead Set by Charlie Brooker to be pretty rubbish (A zombie film? By a journalist? Set in the Big Brother house? Pah.)

In fact, it was excellent. Really good. Tight, gripping, funny and just scary enough.

Very well acted and directed. Brilliant effects. And the writing, apart from  the occasional Brooker-ish flourishes, was mainly quite understated (in a good way) - which seems a surprising thing to say about a zombie film, by a journalist, set in the Big Brother House.

Amid all the tributes to Harold Pinter over the last week, this obituary in The Economist struck me as the most concise and insightful.

In Beckett, a strong influence on Mr Pinter in his beginnings, ordinary conversations would turn metaphysical. His own were packed with menace. Words were offensive, defensive, barriers, knives, stones, a “stratagem” or a “mocking smoke screen”, as he put it, to cover nakedness. Underneath them, something else was being said. Truth was being smothered. He had felt it himself: the suffocation of drama school (abandoned after two terms), or National Service (doggedly resisted, and the fine paid, in 1949), or the bourgeois smugness of the London theatre scene in the late 1950s, which he had tried to explode. Like him, his characters often suddenly made for the window, desperate for air. Or they fell silent. Silence, applied almost musically and poetically, let the dark in. Or the unsaid. 

I also liked this piece by Mark Lawson about how Pinter's dialogue, although it might seem strange written down, was actually a revolution of naturalism.

Some of the dramatist's obituaries treated him as an intellectual obscurist who never quite broke through to the general public; but his plays for ITV in the 1960s were seen by dozens of millions, part of the democratisation of drama that the new medium achieved. Seen now, A Night Out - in which shifty young men keep secrets from craggy but canny matriarchs in exchanges littered with slang, euphemism and stutterings - feels like a Cockney grandma to numerous sitcoms and soap operas, up to EastEnders. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock's Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son, have acknowledged that in Pinter they recognised a colleague in the project of showing the heights low London speech could reach.

One thing that has been underrated, I think, is Pinter's acting. As Max in The Homecoming on Radio 3 a few years ago he was terrifying, funny, pathetic and completely believable. I would have loved to see him as Roote in The Hothouse.

I never saw him act on stage, but he was in the front row for (excellent) readings of The Room and The Dumb Waiter at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2006. A powerful presence even just seated in the audience.