Erudite Updike offers observations

DUE CONSIDERATIONS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM, by John Updike, Knopf, 703 pages, $40

John Updike, 75, is probably America's greatest living writer, having written more than 50 books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among others, and he has been acclaimed consistently by critics.

This book is a welcome, sometimes whimsical, always erudite collection of a variety of his work that falls under the category of "Essays and Criticism." He writes, for instance, about literary biography, my life in cars, Walden, Ted Williams, The New Yorker, New Yorker cartoons and book covers.

Several are engaging essays about other writers, such as Colson Whitehead, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, William Maxwell, Jose Saramago, A.S. Byatt, Muriel Spark and Ian McEwan.

He also writes about Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass and Orhan Pamuk. Updike considers the sinking of the Lusitania, the sexual revolution — and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, John O'Hara and Soren Kierkegaard.

Because Updike is truly a renaissance man, his interests are eclectic — his reading is voracious and he writes an unbelievable number of words about nearly everything.

"The New Yorker as I first knew it," he writes, "from my early acquaintance with its pages as a child of eleven, and then as a contributor from the age of twenty-two, seemed unique — not only the best general magazine in America, but perhaps the best that America ever produced. What was great about it, from a reader's point of view, was the variety and intelligence of its written contents, the beauty and energy of its cartoons, the rigorous factual and typographical accuracy, and the enclosing decorum and decency of it all."

In a section called "Tributes and Short Takes," Updike writes about how New York "taxi drivers don't want to go to West 155th Street. They don't want to be dragged so far uptown with slim prospects of a fare back. If they bring you from the airport, they insist on trying to get there by the Harlem River Drive, discovering too late that the only way to get smoothly onto West 155th is to approach it from across the river, via the Yankee Stadium exit from the Deegan Expressway."

And 155th Street, Updike writes, "has idyllic qualities; it is broad enough for diagonal parking; cobbles peep through its asphalt; and on its southern side the greenery of Trinity Cemetery, lifted high on a succession of terraces, shades the stones and names of many a once-eminent citizen, including John James Audubon, John Jacob Astor, Mayor Fernando Wood. ... "

About E.L. Doctorow, Updike writes: "Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence. His novels and short stories generally seek the shelter of a bygone period in which to take root; when they are set in the present, like City of God (2000), an imp of modernist experimentation and fantasy takes over."

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