John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.
As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.
