The most striking thing to me, in retrospect, about John Updike's passing is that he must've known he was sick. I wrote this about his recent visit to Seattle Arts and Lectures:

"I know there's something wrong with someone who has written 60 books," Updike said of his body of work, but "the end is in sight" and it will be "a relief to not work on novels" anymore.

At the time, I thought it was just an author nearing 80, with mortality on his mind. The audience laughed politely, as though tolerating a fleeting, dark thought (almost a kind of humility, coming from an author whose work will live as long as the language). But lung cancer doesn't just sneak up on you like that; before our eyes, he was wrestling with something more solid than a vague concept of mortality.

When I was a kid, I hated John Updike. I think it's because the first book of his that I tried to read was Bech: A Book. I have a particular distaste for writers writing about writers. And he seemed, at the time, too establishment for alternative young me. But gradually, I read other books of his and I came to appreciate his abilities. The thing about John Updike that's so amazing to me is that he is a craftsman. You can't read his sentences and call them ugly. They are beautiful things, and they also indicate a lot of work: the word choice and the phrasing and the complicated structures don't just come from thin air. They are not just inspiration. There was a steady hand at work in making them, and he was always working on something.

But the other amazing thing about Updike as a writer, too, is that he's an artist. Consider this early, celebrated story of his, "A&P." It's the story of a supermarket checkout clerk and three girls in bathing suits who come into his store. There's lust and struggling against the constraints of society and a noble, or foolish, sentiment and comedy in that story, and it's all a testament to Updike's ability to actually crawl inside the head of a young man working in a supermarket that it works. The language is still beautiful and surprising:

Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room.

...but the commitment to his character is there, too. You don't often see a writer with both a rich imagination and a supreme skill at putting one word after another.

People—including me when I was younger—give him shit for writing about white Massachusetts men who cheat on their wives and for his work's occasionally condescending relationships to women and minorities. But over the course of his career, Updike wrote from the point of view of a young Muslim terrorist, a man in the distant future, supporting characters in Hamlet, an exiled African president, and so many, many more. And not all of those books were successes, but they were certainly all solid efforts. Most literary authors born since the start of Updike's career simply aren't willing to write books like that, to take that kind of chance with their precious careers. But that's what being a novelist is supposed to be. And that's part of what made Updike so great.