UPDIKE IN CINCINNATI: A LITERARY PERFORMANCE, edited by James Schiff, photographs by Jon Hughes, Ohio University Press, 129 pages, $21.95

Such famed writers as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain from earlier eras frequently traveled, spoke to various groups and were voluminously covered in the press. Despite our accelerated information age, however, today's authors rarely get media coverage for book tours or speeches.

That's why "Updike in Cincinnati" is not only unique in its format but risky in its publication. For what seems like an academic exercise, it is appropriate that a university press became the publisher.

Of course, John Updike is one of America's most distinguished authors, having written important and award-winning novels for a generation.

In 2001, he spent two spring days visiting Cincinnati, Ohio. He toured the city, sat for an interview, participated in a panel discussion, read aloud from his fiction and fielded questions from an audience and critics.

These venues gave the novelist the opportunity to display his intelligence, wit and improvisational skills. In the process, he discussed an array of topics, including his abundant writings, his mother and oldest son as writers, baseball history, the Nobel Prize, the Cold War and Shakespeare.

The key instigator of this impressive volume is James Schiff, an English professor at University of Cincinnati, who wrote the introduction and conducted the interview — with help from well-known literary critics W.H. Pritchard and Donald Greiner.

Schiff correctly points out that writers are accustomed to doing the majority of their work in private. Yet most will occasionally step out of isolation to interact with readers. Some are better at it than others, and some are hermits.

It so happens that Updike is a thoughtful, generous and charming man who enjoys "answering questions from horseback" and shines in public settings. Schiff has done an exceptional job in allowing the reader to glimpse Updike in "a public performance."

Before an audience, one of Updike's most interesting, spontaneous comments was: "I never set out to be an essayist or critic. My mother didn't raise me to be one. My notion of being a writer was that you write the stuff — fiction, poetry, whatever; you invent and you don't waste your energy on criticism. But then when I began to receive criticism in the press, it seemed to me that I could do better than this.

"So I volunteered in effect to William Shawn, the then-editor of the New Yorker, to try a few reviews, and he agreed. At first I did them now and then, and then now and then became pretty often, and then pretty often became very often until it seemed to me I was on the point of becoming a reviewer mainly and a fiction writer as a hobby. It was alarming. It was a monster I never meant to bring out of the bottle."

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