The Who of Us

The tributes to John Updike keep pouring in, and I keep reading them. Carlin Romano, in this Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, declares Updike a Master, not just a Master Stylist (as some have accused), and notes that "Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, some valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work in words or rococo flourishes across pages."

Charles McGrath, in the Times' Week in Review (February 1), speaks to the man himself in a beautiful piece entitled "Acknowledgments." He notes Updike's "quiet, burgherly life," his penchant for a round of golf following a morning's work, his reliable presence at the post office (and not in Manhattan, where the deals went down), his rare acceptance of a literary advance, his legacy among writers who prized, in McGrath's words, "his prose—that amazing instrument, like a jeweler's loupe; so precise, so exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless.... He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record existence and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn't quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did."

The world notices a life lived rightly, and not just the art that life brings forth. These past several days, flooded by tributes to Updike, we are reminded that the who of us counts at least as much as the way we write things down.