I’ll leave it to others to offer detailed assessments of John Updike‘s place in the literary constellation. When it came to writings on the strange ways of the middle class, I myself preferred the much-out-of-fashion Sinclair Lewis even though Updike’s style was more graceful. Babbitt has held up surprisingly well—with its reflections on American materialism. Cellphones and computers, as objects of machine-lust, are the new radios and "motor-cars." In loving the hardware, let’s not forget books and words.
Of course there was much more to Updike than just dissections of the middle class in such works as Rabbit, Run. And outside his books Updike made important contributions to the debate on literature and technology. I disagreed with him in the snippetization controversy—we need both whole texts and snippets. In character and to his credit, Updike was a major defender of linear narratives. He simply failed to grasp the possibilities of e-books as a medium to spread around the traditional novel.
Related: Earlier TeleBlog mentions of Updike, Updike-related items in the New York Times, remembrances of Updike by Paul Theroux and other New Yorker writers, and If:book’s new essay on the Web and books.
