No American writer of the last fifty years even approximated the luxuriance of John Updike. In its lengthy obit, the NYT cites this from an early short story: “Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”

Who wouldn’t envy someone who can toss that off?

Still, I think James Wood (also quoted by the Times ) got Updike right when he raised the question of whether luxuriance is enough: “He is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.”