Book Alert / Due Considerations

Due Considerations -- Essays and Criticism by John Updike, Knopf '07, $40, 703 pages, ISBN #0307266400. Index, occasional sketches sprinkled through text.

This, his ninth collection of essays and criticism, John Updike dedicates to his multi-talented editors David Remnick and Henry Finder, "who kept me in the game into the late innings." This note of gratitude, of course, is merely a literary conceit, since by tradition, many New Yorker scribes have hit their longest balls late in the action.

Whatever elixir is dispensed from the water fountains at this iconic magazine has allowed many of its heavy hitters to still pad down the halls to collect their paychecks into their ninth decade. Consider the age some of them hung up their spikes -- William Shawn at 80, Brendan Gill at 83, Joseph Mitchell at 88. William Maxwell got away with working at home in his pjs until 91. And Roger Angell still contributes at 87.

Next to these, John Updike is middle-aged even though he's been publishing books now for a full half-century. I confess a big brotherly affection for Updike, whom I discovered in college while he was experiencing the angst of turning 30. For me, he's acted like a point man, returning through the underbrush to tell me what snares lie around life's next corner. Though I was not a high school basketball hero, I identified withthe Rabbit tetralogy and Harry Angstrom, as he experienced marriage, fatherhood and the vicissitudes of business and, predictably, was not pleased when my oracle killed off his character at age 56.

Writers like Updike do certainly seem to have a charmed life, contributing weekly to America's foremost literary magazine for what presumably is a handsome paycheck, then shipping an accumulated stack of essays and reviews off to the publisher every few years for yet another payday. Yet any writer who can pull off such a trick in this cutthroat industry deserves my applause, not my envy.

In his latest collection, Updike writes about life at The New Yorker, offers profiles of individuals as varied as Eudora Welty, Ted Williams and JFK, Jr.; reflects on such literary works as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Max Beerbohm's Seven Men, and Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day; holds forth on the arts of American vs. English fiction, literary biography and non-fiction, and art, which he studied at Oxford from 1955-7, as we've learned in every jacket bio since The Poorhouse Fair in 1959.

Updike's final section deals with Personal Considerations, a potpourri of idiosyncratic essays. Consider: Summer Love, My Philadelphia, and various forewards and introductions to works of those lucky enough to win a John Updike contribution. If this prolific author considers himself to be in the late innings, I figure it can't be past the seventh, and with any luck the game will go into extra innings.