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[p. 53] Wait until the kids get bored with yelling and splashing. Then, beside the pool, it is crystalline. Soak in the sun. Listen to the town. You have never heard of this town before: this is important. Otherwise, there are expectations, and a plan. This is not to say the town need be small. America conceals immense things. Here are thousands of busy souls as untangent to you as individual rocks on the moon. Say the town is in California, on the dry side of the Sierras; though it could as well be in Iowa, or Kentucky, or Connecticut. Out of nowhere, here it has arrived. Listen. The wavelets in the pool lap the tile gutter. The rush of traffic along Route Whatever-It-Is doesn’t miss you; it sings, sighs, cruises, hurls multitudes, passes as a river. Nearer by, car tires chew the gravel, creeping closer. Look. Two long-haired children in patched jeans, their clothes full of insignias, pale, scarcely older than your own children, emerge, with a reluctance somehow loving, from a crumpled green Volkswagen, and walk to the motel office. A far-off door slams. Retreating tires chew the gravel smaller and smaller. In the other direction, a laundry cart rattles. And beyond all this, enclosing it, like a transparent dome, an indecipherable murmur, like bees in the eaves or the continual excited liquid tremolo of newly hatched birds …

– John Updike
“How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time”
from Problems: And Other Stories (1981)

Fiction is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality. Reality is — chemically, anatomically, biologically — a fabric of microscopic accuracies. Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs. The intensity of the grapple is the surest pleasure a writer receives. Though our first and final impression of Creation is not that it was achieved by taking pains, perhaps we should proceed in the humble faith that, by taking pains, word by word, to be accurate, we put ourselves on the way toward making something useful and beautiful and, in a word, good.

– John Updike, from his 1964 National Book Award acceptance speech, published in Picked-Up Pieces (1975)

[p. 198] He looked over. She was standing by the window, pinned between a hot radiator and Rodney Gelb, the office Romeo. Outside, behind the black window, it had begun to snow, and the lighted windows of the office building across the street were blurring and fluttering. Jeanette had come to the brokerage house that fall, a tidy secretary in a pimento wool suit, with a prim ruffled blouse. For this evening’s event she had ventured open-toed shoes and a dress of lavender gabardine, with zigzag pleats marked at their points by flattened bows. The flush the party punch had put in her cheeks helped him to see for the first time the something highly polished about her compact figure, an impression of an object finely made, down to the toenails that peeked through the tips of her shoes. Her profile showed pert and firm as she strained to look up into Rodney’s overbearing, beetle-browed face. Brad stepped over to them, into the steamy warmth near the radiator. The snow was intensifying; across the street the golden windows were softening like pats of butter.

– John Updike
“Made in Heaven” from Trust Me: Stories (1987)

1932-2009

[p. 455] Back on 95, Rabbit pushes through Georgia. As darkness comes on, it begins to rain, and with his old eyes, that can’t sort out the lights too well at night any more, the rain is oppressive. He even turns off the radio, he feels so battered by pellets of experience. His body from being in one position so long feels as if somebody’s been pounding it with sandbags. He better pull off. He finds a Ramada Inn beyond Brunswick. He eats a fried-catfish special that doesn’t sit too well on top of the pastrami, especially the candied yams and the pecan pie; but why be in Georgia if you can’t have pecan pie? The walk back to his room past the other motel doors, on cement sheltered by the continuous balcony overhead, is secretly blissful. In out of the rain. Sense enough. They can’t catch me. But his long moment of happiness reminds him of all those exposed unhappy loved ones back in Diamond County. Guilt gouges at his heart like a thumb in a semi-sensitive eye.

– John Updike
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

(If you have not read John Updike’s work, we recommend starting with the four Rabbit Angstrom novels — required reading — and any or all of the short stories (there are many) up to and including those collected in The Afterlife.)