It occurred to me last night, in bed by 10:30, that our sex is so important, my incompetencies bulk so large, because it’s what we do; in a marriage these ups and downs are easily absorbed in the business of making a household and being a couple in public.… Oh Joan, you put it so beautifully, saying that if we don’t make each other happy we should end it. Why did my heart quail at such simplicity? Perhaps because I am unhappy away from you in rough proportion to how happy I am with you, which is very; that I, who formally believe that life is dialectical, and lived in tension, seem to be the one having difficulty with our existence in secret, surrounded by blind gossip, interwoven with our spouses and their libidinous and physiological ups and downs, and now with our intermixed children—how strange and sweet and yet disquieting.

From these samples of Updike’s sexual correspondence (they appear to have been mercifully truncated and selected), Updike wrote some of the most detailed, reasonably thought-out, and unromantic letters ever composed by a major writer; and placing them against those of, say, Flaubert or even Chekhov might make it seem as if he were both colder and more intrepid in his infidelities, as if he were simply punching out numbers on bingo cards. The biggest disappointment of the letters is that the writer himself is never quite so endearing as the many wonderfully selfish characters he created from his own cloth, whether it’s the candy-chomping Rabbit Angstrom or the sexually uninhibited witches of Eastwick. He managed to create memorable, even likable characters who suffered from the worst human frailties, from gluttony, selfishness, and unfaithfulness to a failure to live up to the best ambitions they harbored for themselves.  

While Updike’s life and creative work focused on the people, living rooms, bedrooms, and streets of the middle American towns and country clubs where he lived, he steadily reviewed for The New Yorker hundreds of books on a wide variety of subjects while spending more time and attention than any normal reviewer could normally afford. He turned down a request from Philip Roth to provide a few thousand words of introduction to a slender volume of stories by the great Polish writer Bruno Schulz, on the grounds that, as he wrote Roth in 1978:

To do it right, I would have to read all of Schulz in English and maybe acquaint myself with the Polish/Eastern European scene far better than I am.… I introduced Henry Green a while back out of love, paying an old debt; with Schulz I would have to work up the debt, the love, and at this moment, feeling harried and fragmented, I don’t want to commit myself to such a working-up. Please forgive me.

For Updike, writing prose about anything (especially other books) seemed commensurate in terms of energy with the actual living of life; and yet for all his attention to details, Updike’s interest in the political world was limited. He rarely offers much in the way of pronouncements about national or international politics (though he is a constant critic of the visual ugliness of American landscapes and culture), and on one of the rare times he did offer a political opinion, it embroiled him in the sort of conflict he most hated—one that distracted him from his work.