Updike's Licks of Love

John Updike on writing books (via Paris Review):

I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. 

Spent the afternoon reading Licks of Love, a sequel to the Rabbit series. 

Ian McEwan said about Updike: 

Great sentence-maker; extraordinary noticer; wonderful eye for detail; great fondler of details, to use Nabokov’s phrase. Huge comic gift, finding its supreme expression in the Bech trilogy . . . He reminds us that all good writing, good observation contains a seed of comedy. A wonderful maker of similes. His gift was to render for us the fine print, the minute detail of consciousness, of what it’s like in a certain moment to be another person, to inhabit another mind. In that respect, Angstrom will be his monument.

A sampling of Updike's wonderful sentences: 

They hear the train lash at the loose-fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged. (Context: Nelson meets his stepsister Annabelle, whose existence he had just recently learned about.)

These dysfunctional make him aware of how functional he is. They don't bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others. (Context: Nelson works in a mental health clinic.)

This pale man in bifocals, the pride of the Harrison's, reminds her of a doctor—the same chilly neatness, the same superior air of having mastered a language only a few can speak. (Context: Annabelle, the newly discovered stepsister, is invited to a family dinner, where she is welcomed with mixed feelings.)

If I could go on and on, it will look like I'm impersonating Frank Bruni, who compiles the most amazing sentences in current publications. My point is: John Updike is a delight to read—on a sentence-level, much so on a paragraph-level. McEwan writes: 

When I feel my faith flagging in the whole enterprise of fiction – and all writers experience this – a few pages of Updike will restore my energies and optimism.