John Updike filled his 50 years of writing with probably seven or eight normal writing careers. He did so by fusing two artistic virtues that rarely meet in the same person: a frisky, easy, improvisational energy and a rigorous, workaday discipline. He was both the ant and the grasshopper, accountant and poet, Trollope and Rimbaud. His solution to the daily crisis of inspiration was simply not to have it: He wrote steadily, with very little angst, three pages a day, five days a week. Along the way, he mastered pretty much every genre humans have seen fit to invent, including such comparatively rare forms as the self-interview via a fictional alter ego, the book review in the style of the book under review, and the sonnet about one’s own feces (“a flawless coil, / unbroken, in the bowl”). The resulting body of work is so large and thoroughly lauded, the achievements by now so familiar—the casual erudition, the freakish powers of micro-observation, the pioneering description of once-neglected middle-class hobbies such as adultery and divorce—that it can be hard, today, to see any of it fresh. His productivity itself was intimidating: that never-ending series of series (Bech, Rabbit, Eastwick) and collection of collections. The prospect of dipping into his work sometimes feels like going for a day hike on Mount Everest.
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