A fan letter, by Nicholson Baker, to John Updike. I have to say, it seems sort of churlish of The New York Review to block complete access, because I'm pretty sure the "teaser" you can see for nothing is more than half the whole. For sure it includes the part I like best:
I thought what an amazing thing that Mr. Updike has been writing all the years that I have been growing up, and how I have come to depend on the idea that he is writing away as a soothing idea, and then I was reminded of Trollope, and how nice it must have been for writers back then to go about their lives knowing that Mr. Trollope was going to have a new book coming out soon, that it would be good; and they might not read all of the things he wrote, but they would read some, and they would know that what they didn’t read they were missing, but were comforted also that they knew what kind of man he was because they had already read a lot of what he wrote; and the idea they had of the man who gradually had written all these books was a powerful, happy thing in their lives.
I was trying to say something similar here. And when I wrote, here:
It's a comfort to think that, for those of us who did not know him personally, access to Updike is no less than before. Being sustained by him, it's a further comfort to contemplate how much his reading seems to have sustained him. His love of books and learning is palpable on the written page. Sometimes it breaks out with a little yell. His introduction to Hugging the Shore concludes,
. . . I live again in a big white house with a view of saltwater. I keep looking out the window. The clean horizon beckons. All sorts of silvery shadows streak the surface of the sea. Sailboats dot it, some far out. It looks like literature. What a beautiful sight!
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