“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, but they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzly over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”

The parody, please note, precedes by five years Hemingway’s own Nobel prize. As far as I know, there’s no record of Cheever’s reaction to Hemingway as laureate—no pastiche of Faulkner dissing Papa—though I like to think he would have used the phrase “outraged disbelief.”

JOHN UPDIKE’s last review for The New Yorker (March 9, $4.99)—an unwelcome thought on all counts—was of Mr. Bailey’s Cheever biography. Though he hailed Mr. Bailey’s book as “a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal,” Updike also made it clear that he found the task of reading at length about Cheever’s unhappiness a fearsome burden. Who can blame him? He was already gravely ill with the cancer that would kill him only weeks later.

How amazing, then, to find that the review, though written under a death sentence, is dotted with phrases charged with the signature Updike élan. About Cheever’s journals, for instance: “an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment.” About Cheever’s closeted homosexuality: “Repression and expression: twin causes of complication and disharmony with others.” And again: “There was, between his shadowy ‘proclivities’ and his luminous work, an almost organic disconnect.”

Updike’s professionalism has always been a source of wonder to me—the furious work rate; the invariably high standard of the vast oeuvre; the impeccable, universal civility—but this last instance of his devotion to his craft tops it all. Hats off.

THE BRILLIANT and mischievous Hilary Mantel, musing in The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) about the famous moment when Coleridge, in the midst of composing “Kubla Khan,” was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” admits to herself that most writers have occasion to pray for the diversion of an interruption, especially when they know they’re ready to start writing:

“The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticize them later. You give this advice but can’t always take it. You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. Select one, write it, and it begins to seem in some sense pre-ordained, natural, correct; the other options fade from memory. Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. Writers, as generations of jealous spouses have learned to their cost, are not naturally monogamous. We don’t want to choose; we want to keep open all the possibilities, fill a lifetime with fresh and less-than-final versions.”

I’m particularly sensitive to those remarks because I’m about to embark on a daunting project (a biography of the heroic John Updike, no less), which will interrupt, for a couple of years, the writing of the Bookie. I’m grateful to The Observer for generously allowing me to take an extended sabbatical—and I hope no one suspects that I signed up to write the book merely to avoid a weekly deadline!

John Cheever was inordinately fond of the word “inestimable”: It shows up twice in the brief preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978), the best seller that pushed him at last to the top of the heap (he was now king of the short story, while Saul Bellow ruled over the novel); and again in the first story of the collection, “Goodbye, My Brother,” written in 1950, when Cheever was not yet 40:

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

He liked the word and the word suits him: There’s something inestimable about his work, a magic that defies measurement. And the sorrow and loneliness of his inner life—that, too, is inestimable, even though all the relevant information is now on the table: Blake Bailey’s definitive biography, Cheever (no one will ever want to know more about this particular life), and the two-volume Library of America edition of Cheever’s work (edited by Mr. Bailey). Posterity will make its judgment about his place in the canon; meanwhile, we can admire a prodigious and mysterious achievement—and contemplate, for as long as we can bear, the misery from which it sprung.

“RARELY HAS A GIFTED and creative life seemed sadder,” wrote John Updike when The Journals of John Cheever were published in 1991, nine years after the author’s death. Before that we’d been privy to The Letters of John Cheever (1988), edited by his son Ben, and Home Before Dark (1984), a frank memoir by his daughter, Susan. The combination of those three volumes should have prepared us for a uniquely depressing life story—and yet it’s still a shock to realize, halfway through Mr. Bailey’s biography, that the grimness will not abate, that the successful writer who in 1964 has his face on the cover of Time magazine (“Ovid in Ossining”), the genial and charming John Cheever with his famous “childlike sense of wonder,” is desperately unhappy and destined to become more so.

Already in 1964, during what he had to admit was an “extraordinary run of luck,” he was drinking heavily before any public appearance, so as to keep a smile fixed on his face—“and afterward,” Mr. Bailey writes, “he felt so ashamed of himself that he drank more.” Cheever confided in his journal: “I feel like a remorseful masturbator holding his aching, softening cock in one hand while sperm runs down the wall paper like the white of an egg.” Yes, that is the tone of his intimate confessions, which is one reason why I chose to quote that passage, another being that it links his shyness, his remorse, his sexuality and his drinking—four demons that tormented him for most of his life.

Loneliness and alienation were the keynotes of his dismal childhood in Quincy, Mass., and his sense of his own isolation persisted into his 20s, when he was a hungry young writer in Depression-era New York. “The thing I miss most,” he wrote, “is an ability to identify myself with a group.” You would have thought that marriage in 1941 to the long-suffering Mary Winternitz would begin to heal the rift, and that the birth of his first child in 1943 would finish the job. No such luck. A year after he’d settled his young family into a suburban enclave in Westchester, Cheever wrote in his journal, “Every indifferent glance, every back turned by chance, every hint of indifference, real or imagined, sinks into my breast like an arrow dipped in poison.” In fact, his new role as a family man only made matters worse. Despite his yearning for a “Norman Rockwell image,” he thought of himself as “a pariah—a small dirty fraud … a spiritual and sexual impostor.”

Ah, yes—the matter of what he called his “contested sexual identity.” “[F]lesh lusteth contrary to the spirit”—that, writes Mr. Bailey, is “surely the major theme of Cheever’s work as well as his life.” To put it bluntly, Cheever had sex with boys as a boy and with men as a young man. He seems to have desisted for the first 20 years of his marriage, but temptation (the promptings of his “wayward cock”) plagued him: “If I followed my instincts, I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

And when he did eventually succumb, he was “consumed,” according to Mr. Bailey, “with an almost suicidal self-loathing.” The vicious cycle that persisted for at least three decades spins roughly like this: His dread of being found out—exposed as an impostor—drove him to drink, which led to impotence and undermined his marriage, which drove him to drink, with the same result or worse. And so on.

IT'S TOO NEAT TO suggest, as Cheever himself did, that his “contested” sexuality could be sublimated in his writing (“I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines”). When Cheever discovered in the late ’70s that a literary scholar had written a dissertation in which the author’s secret bisexuality unlocks the hidden meaning of his work, Cheever mocked the notion in his journal with withering sarcasm: “In order to conceal my homosexuality I married, made my wife miserable and bitter and finally rose to greatness in my last novel [Falconer] by admitting my love for cock.”

For me, the experience of reading Cheever is not appreciably enhanced by an intimate familiarity with the sordid details of his romps with men (and women), or by learning that his libido remained rampant even when he was terminally ill with cancer (in Mr. Bailey, oddly, this information “excites awe and even a trace of envy”). Nor does it help to have followed day by day the arc of his worsening alcoholism, which reached its nadir in 1975, when he very nearly succeeded in drinking himself into a shabby grave. (“I keep reading biographies of Fitzgerald,” Cheever wrote in the sodden mid-60s, “and I always get to bawling at the end.”)

Mr. Bailey’s research is impeccable and exhaustive—a mighty feat, though sometimes a mixed blessing for a reader oppressed by the weight of stubborn fact and the ticktock march of seamless chronology. Fortunately, Mr. Bailey’s encyclopedic knowledge of the particulars of Cheever’s unhappiness has not clouded his appreciation of Cheever’s writing; the commentary on the work is judicious and nuanced.

I also admired the confident sketches of a large and fascinating supporting cast, among them Malcolm Cowley, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Updike and Allan Gurganus. Harold Brodkey makes a couple of cameo appearances, and earns this memorable Cheever put-down: “I think of Brodkey in St. Louis, falling in love with himself because there was no one else so intelligent handsome and rich in the neighborhood; and how bitter this marriage was.” (Lines like that show off the brilliance of the journals—that massive monument, to borrow Mr. Bailey’s phrase, “of tragicomic solipsism.”)

AS IF THE LIFE weren’t sad enough, Mr. Bailey delivers in his epilogue dispiriting news of slumping sales figures: Cheever isn’t read much these days. One hopes that this biography and the Library of America edition will spark a revival.

Sorrow and hope, joy and bleakest despair—Cheever was a virtuoso when it came to hitting the high and low notes of the human scale, sometimes in dazzlingly tight sequence. (Think of “The Swimmer” and the extraordinary emotional landscape Neddy Merrill traverses on his aquatic cross-county journey.)

Let me leave you with a little taste (also aquatic: Cheever loved the water), a typical New Yorker story from 1959, “The Golden Age,” about Seton, a television writer who wishes he were a poet and has brought his family to a seaside village in Italy—“because he wants to lead a more illustrious life”:

“He dives, and swims through a school of transparent fish, and farther down, where the water is dark and cold, he sees a large octopus eye him wickedly, gather up its members, and slip into a cave paved with white flowers. There, at the edge of the cave he sees a Greek vase, an amphora. He dives for it, feels the rough clay on his fingers, and goes up for air. He dives again and again, and finally brings the vase triumphantly into the light. It is a plump form with a narrow neck and two small handles. The neck is looped with a scarf of darker clay. It is broken nearly in two. Such vases, and vases much finer, are often found along that coast, and if they are of no value they stand on the shelves of the café, the bakery, and the barbershop, but the value of this one to Seton is inestimable—as if the fact that a television writer could reach into the Mediterranean and bring up a Greek vase were a hopeful cultural omen, proof of his own worthiness.”

Adam Begley is at work on a biography of John Updike. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Well, let me stir up these muddy waters with a selection of reviews, alternately ecstatic and apoplectic, from the British press. First, a Times vs. Times match-up that should leave your head spinning: Whereas Ms. Kakutani considers The Kindly Ones “a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies” (note the repetition of “pointless”), historian Anthony Beevor, writing in the London Times, flatly declares that it’s “a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping”—and, in case you have lingering doubts, that it’s “a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come” (note the repetition of “great”).

Not sure which Times to believe? Well, Peter Kemp, fiction editor of The Sunday Times assures us that The Kindly Ones is “so bloatedly inept that its reverential reception across the Channel seems barely comprehensible.” He, too, wants to make sure we know how he feels: “[T]his Third Reich novel, for all its plethora of detail, carr[ies] as much conviction as a plastic Iron Cross”—which means, I guess that with the score two to one against, we’ll have to wait for The New York Times Book Review to show its hand before we declare the four-way Times tournament a draw or a defeat for Mr. Littell.

To confuse matters further, some critics are themselves of two minds. Donald Morrison, writing in the Financial Times, zigzags deliriously: “The Kindly Ones … is revolting, overlong and far from lucid. But it is also erudite, pitiless and mesmerising.” So what’s the verdict? On the one hand Mr. Littell “leaves no dead horse unbeaten, no atrocity undescribed, no depth of depravity unplumbed. Little wonder The Kindly Ones is so exasperating”—but on the other hand, it’s a book that “tries to ask the big questions. And fails magnificently.” Andrew Hussey, writing in The Independent, is similarly conflicted: He calls it both a “deeply flawed work” and “an entertaining read” (two of the hoariest clichés from criticism’s vast trove of worn-out phrases) before concluding, unhelpfully, that “it may not be ‘Holocaust porn’ but it is ‘Holocaust kitsch.’”

George Walden knows exactly what he thinks, but he’s mixed up about altitude. Writing in The Telegraph, he judges that “with its sex ‘n’ fascism horror comic theme, at heart this is a low, conventionally minded novel”—before pivoting neatly: “This is a work of high vulgarity and great cynicism, whose only attraction is its inadvertent humour.” Thumbs down, I guess.

It may be wrong to wrap up so many contradictory assertions in a neat package, but I can’t resist pointing out that although the prescient Mr. Walden’s review appeared two years ago (when only the French edition was available), he and Ms. Kakutani settled on the very same adjective to describe Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones: “odious.”

To give you a taste of the sheer verve of Ms. Haskell’s writing, here’s her summary description of Leigh, Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo before they were transformed into bona fide stars: “These actresses hadn’t yet had their eyebrows plucked, their teeth whitened and straightened, their breasts raised, their hairlines changed—in other words, been submerged in the Hollywood developing emulsion that raises star power to its full electromagnetic force.”

COLLECTING RARE BIRDS is a hobby worthy of a Flannery O’Connor character, and her famous fascination with peacocks fits, too, but the odd touch that’s perfect—a tidbit I picked up from Brad Gooch’s excellent Flannery (Little, Brown, $30)—is that O’Connor more often referred to her peacocks as “peafowl.” That hint of perversity, of stubborn precision, evoked for me in a word the full, creepy splendor of the author of Wiseblood and The Violent Bear It Away. O’Connor worked on the latter, her second novel, for six years; she prayed for it when she was visiting Lourdes—and reported to a friend that her “little vacation from the Opus Nauseous seems to have done me some creative good anyway.” Shall we say that the O.N. grew into a miraculously fine piece of work?

Mr. Gooch’s is patient and tactful with the publicity-shy and dauntingly complex O’Connor. His book is a welcome introduction to the quiet, narrow life of a fiercely funny and unnervingly powerful writer.

(Flannery is graced with an apt blurb from Joel Conarroe: “A good biographer is hard to find.”)

DAVID GRANN’s The Lost City of Z (Doubleday, $27.50) is also a biography of sorts—of Percy Fawcett, the indefatigable British explorer who spent two decades crisscrossing the Amazon jungle in search of an ancient civilization (which he called “Z” and the rest of us would probably call Eldorado). Fawcett never located his lost city; he found only misery and disease and more biting insects than there are fish in the sea. Fawcett, his 22-year-old son and his son’s best friend all vanished in 1925, somewhere in the Mato Grosso, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.

Mr. Grann’s book is a story of obsession: Fawcett’s; that of the 100 or so explorers over the years who have died trying to find out what happened to him; and Mr. Grann’s, which sent the New Yorker writer into the Amazon in search of his own Z—“a hidden metropolis of words and paragraphs”—a blockbuster tale of adventure. I’m pleased to report that he found it.

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA.

Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the first black artist to be given a one-man show at MoMA. (That was in 1937, when Edmondson was about 63 years old, about six years after the retired hospital janitor had begun carving stone with a railroad spike and hammer.)

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA. The poems are by Ms. Spires, and they are indeed easy to read; some of them are merely Edmondson’s own words arranged in stanzas. And the sculptures … well, the artist thought he was divinely inspired (“I’se just doing the Lord’s Work. I didn’t know I was no artist till them folks told me I was”); I may be a card-carrying atheist, but I wouldn’t want to argue with him: His figures are limestone brought to life.

I Heard God Talking to Me comes together in splendid harmony—a beautiful book, simple and powerful. Like Edmondson’s sculpture, it’s a work of art without being in the least artsy.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR the Philip Pullman blurb on the cover, I would assume that no atheist could properly appreciate David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives (Pantheon, $20), a collection of imaginative prose doodles about what could happen after we die. I found myself very occasionally amused, in particular by the scenario that has the virtuous rotting peacefully in their graves while the iniquitous endure suburbia for all eternity: “Only sinners enjoy life after death.” (Nice choice of verb.)

A neuroscientist who has three more books coming within the next two years, all of them purely scientific, Mr. Eagleman is a capable writer. But his ideas about the hereafter aren’t nearly startling enough. Almost all of them presuppose some kind of supernatural agency—which means I immediately lose any real interest. Inertia and mild curiosity kept me reading, even after the repetition of the standard formula “In the afterlife …” began to grate.

The author’s most successful trick is to play on our preconceived sense of scale. Humans, in this vignette, “are merely the nutritional substrate”:

“There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn’t exist—but you’d be wrong. It’s simply that He doesn’t know we exist. He is unaware of us because we’re at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.”

Wow. Takes me right back to those dorm-room bull sessions.

FROM DANIEL ZALEWSKI'S very long and somewhat solemn profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker (Feb. 23, $4.50): “The idea of an afterlife, that we’ll meet again in some … theme park? There seems no good reason to think so.”

Mr. Zalewski’s best moment:

“McEwan’s presiding interest has always been psychology, and, like many scientists of his generation, he has shifted his intellectual allegiances. At first, he studied perversity; now he studies normality. His first god was Freud. Now it is Darwin.”

Mr. McEwan’s, saved for the very end:

“You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

If your first thought is Mad Men, think again. Though Ogilvy, a Scot born in England who remained a British citizen all his life, loved to make a splash (arriving at his New York office in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce, sporting the finest tweeds and a black, full-length, crimson-lined cape) and certainly looked the part, tall, handsome and fond of pretty women, he was also a tireless worker—“the least lazy person,” a colleague called him.

It helps, if you’re reading The King of Madison Avenue, to have some interest in advertising, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Though Ogilvy’s peculiar genius was most successfully expressed in his professional life, it was manifest in many other areas as well. A shame that Norman Mailer snared the title Advertisements for Myself—it would have suited Ogilvy admirably.

“I’m a lousy copywriter,” he liked to say, “but a good editor.” Mr. Roman, who worked with him at Ogilvy & Mather for 26 years, is more effusive:

“Being edited by Ogilvy was like being operated on by a great surgeon who could put his hand on the only tender organ in your body. You could feel him put his finger on the wrong word, the soft phrase, the incomplete thought. But there was no pride of authorship, and he could be quite self-critical. Someone found a personally notated copy of one of his books in which he had written cross comments about his own writing: ‘Rubbish,’ ‘Rot!’ ‘Nonsense.’ He would send his major documents around for comment, with a note: ‘Please improve.’”

That’s my kind of hero.

A WORD OF advice to the duo (Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser) who edited Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak (Harper Perennial, $10): Three books of six-word memoirs is too many (and so is two, but the urge to publish a follow-up to the original volume of mini-memoirs, Not Quite What I Was Planning, must have been irresistible—especially after the debut spent a talismanic six weeks on the best-seller list). Of course there are some gems in the new collection, but not enough of them to warrant a second sequel. Quit while you’re ahead!

Six favorites:

“Don’t trust a man who waxes.” —Noelle Hancock (a former Observer reporter)

“Met him online. Blogged our divorce.” —Kristy Sammis

“It never hurt as good again.” —Marc Ecko

“I should have seen him coming.” —Kelly Bruce

“He sees the me I don’t.” —Mary Catherine Hamelin

“I was smitten, now I’m smote.” —Bobby Wynne

AND SPEAKING OF love and heartbreak, Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire (Ecco, $24.99) is just as good as the various rave reviews promise. With a minimum of psychobabble and a maximum of tight-focus unsentimental and unsqueamish reporting, Mr. Bergner tells the story of four people with “abnormal” sex lives: a foot fetishist, a dominatrix, a man obsessed with his stepdaughter and a man sexually attracted to amputees.

The reader, of course, is transformed into a voyeur—but the author’s cool authoritative tone and openhearted acceptance of what he’s exposing wash away all taint of kinky vicarious thrill. It’s enough to make you think that in this case, good reporting isn’t just morally neutral. It spreads the love.

“Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God’s-eye view.”

A FEW OF my favorite passages from the flood of eulogies:

“I love Updike’s writing so much I can barely read it. My eye falls on a sentence. My mood has already improved. I slam the book shut. Another sentence may do me in. Still, I read on, and my mood goes vaulting upward yet again. This isn’t reading; this is drinking. I read him in order to become ebullient. Those extra words he plunks into his sentences, the unusual images, the way that everything seems to shimmer, his habit of dissolving each new visible thing into microscopic radiant glints of God knows what—every last over-the-top element of Updike’s prose has the effect of lighting me up.” —Paul Berman

“Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It’s as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye.” —Martin Amis

“Even when his essays included a harsh criticism, he politely coiled it, tucked it inside, part snake, part rose, and the reader would feel the bite sprung silkily only at the end—in a balletic allegiance to both generosity and candor.” —Lorrie Moore

“Updike’s example seemed the model of a real writer’s life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades.” —Zadie Smith

“Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it, may have had to do with his exile from his own writing that day, while travelling; the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home.” —Roger Angell

AND HERE—one last fadeaway—is the first paragraph of an interview Updike gave just three months ago (the interviewer is the eminent Peter Conrad):

“‘Lately,’ said John Updike, ‘I’ve been feeling not so much a wish to die as a wish that being alive didn’t generate so many demands.’ Sitting across from Updike in a Boston hotel suite with my notebook open, I was the demand, and I have to say that he looked equal to it: now 76, with a wintry shock of white hair, his eyes gleamed in his angular, beveled face, and his mouth curved in wry amusement. ‘You write a book,’ he went on, ‘and that generates demands, like this interview—though of course I’m sure it will be perfectly delightful!’”

Updike was right, as usual: The interview is a delight, Updike as the polished old pro, charming, sly, gracious, generously intent on the task at hand.

“One day for some reason John came to see us alone, in the early afternoon. We were in our living room, which was flooded by the afternoon sun. You were in your Easy Chair, a contraption in universal use then among advanced couples, which allowed the pre-toddler to recline rather as though he were in a barber’s chair having his hair shampooed. One of John’s less-known talents was his skill as a juggler. He took three oranges from a bowl on the coffee table and began to juggle for you, and you began to laugh. Astonishing belly laughter.”

I don’t think I saw Updike again until I was already a critic and a reporter, a 35-year-old in awe of the great man but obliged by my profession to have opinions, critical opinions, about his work. By that time he’d made me laugh many times—maybe not the belly laughter of a 2-year-old, but as good as you can get with a literary novel in your hands.

And now the flow of words has finally stopped, one of the great outpourings ever to come from an American writer. There was quantity: 27 novels, over 60 books in all. And there was quality: the famous Updike prose, elaborate, ingenious, wonderfully mellifluous—we’re going to hear a lot over the next few days about the glory of his prose. There was the cool fluidity that never deserted him, in book after book after book. He had a topic, too, which he mined exhaustively: the psyche of the ordinary middle-class American male in the second half of the 20th century. (He once described his mission as the attempt to “transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery.”) But what made Updike different, what pumped up his talent and made him a giant presence on the literary landscape, was his restless mind, an intellectual curiosity that led him all over the globe and into every nook and cranny of modern life.

Very few people knew that he was ill. Two months ago at a photo shoot, according to Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity at Knopf, Updike’s publisher for the length of his 50-year career, he looked fit and healthy. And yet he died Tuesday morning, at a hospice in Danvers, Mass., of lung cancer.

“A big light has gone out,” said Ian McEwan, sounding dazed, minutes after he’d heard the news. Of course, Mr. McEwan mentioned the prose—“He turned a sentence better than anyone else”—but he moved quickly on, ticking off subjects Updike had written about with effortless grace: “computers, car dealerships, golf, art, science, human passion, with a reach that was unmatched.”

His best subject was John Up­dike. Imagine, for a moment, that all we had of Updike was his autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing. The early novels set in and around the Pennsylvania neighborhoods he knew as a boy, his debut, The Poorhouse Fair (1959); The Centaur (1963); Of the Farm (1965); and the Olinger stories, “Pigeon Feathers” foremost among them. Those alone would count as an honorable life’s work for many a writer. Add in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), and all the material he filched from his later life in Manhattan (briefly) and Massachusetts, from his many loves (oh, his loves!), and you already have a great writer’s output.

And then there’s Rabbit. In an interview five years ago, he told me, “I think every novel I’ve written has been uncomfortable, except possibly the Rabbit novels. Once he got to loping along and I got the characters named and I could see the cityscape in my mind, it was like a snowball—there was always more.” From snowball to avalanche: The tetralogy covered four decades of Harry Angstrom and the whole country—Rabbit, he admitted in the introduction to the Everyman edition that gathered the four novels, “became too much a receptacle … for every item in the headlines.” Perhaps—but he brought us the news about ourselves.

Updike loved to be a bellwether. Couples (1968) landed him on the cover of Time magazine: He’d just invented sex in suburbia. Here, for example, is the wonderful grope in the laundry room:

“Janet’s chest and hips, pillows sodden with grief, pressed him against the enameled edge of the dryer; he was trapped at the confluence of cold tears and hot breath. He kissed her gaping mouth, the rutted powder of her cheeks, the shying trembling bulges of her shut eyes. Her body his height, they dragged each other down, into a heap of unwashed clothes, fluffy ends of shirtsleeves and pajama pants, the hard floor underneath them like a dank bone. Sobbing, she pulled up her sweater and orange-striped jersey and, in a moment of angry straining, uncoupled her bra, so her blue-white breasts came tumbling of their own loose weight, too big to hold, tumbled like laundry from the uplifted basket of herself, nipples buttons, veins seaweed green. He went under. Her cold nails contemplated the tensed sides of his sucking mouth, and sometimes a finger curiously searched out his tongue. Harold opened his eyes to see that the great window giving on the lawn was solidly golden; no child’s watching shadow cleft it … His face was half-pillowed in dirty clothes smelling mildly of his family, of Jonathan and Julia and Henrietta and Marcia. He was lying on ghosts that had innocently sweated. Janet’s touch fumbled at his fly and he found the insect teeth of the zipper snug along her side. Tszzc: he tugged and the small neat startled sound awoke them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t. Not here.’”

Unlike Philip Roth, Updike had no late-innings rally. None of his best novels were written in the last decade. (By the way, let it never be forgotten that he wrote one of the great pieces of baseball journalism, on Ted Williams’ home run in his last at-bat in 1960: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” in The New Yorker: “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”)

It can’t be said that he never repeated himself—the reiteration of Rabbit, The Widows of Eastwick (2008) limping after The Witches of Eastwick (1984)—but mostly he swerved, taking the unpredictable tack, often with stunning results. Remember The Coup (1978)? What was Updike doing in Africa? Writing, it turned out, a best seller. He sent Bech, his alter ego, to Eastern Europe and Russia with hilarious results. In Terrorist (2006), he ventured into the mind of an Arab-American teenager, a devout Muslim, and pulled it off. Other expeditions into exotic realms were less successful. Gertrude and Claudius (2000), the Hamlet prequel, a journey into the distant past, was a curiosity and a challenge, one of several novels in which his agile intellect outstripped his human heart.

His criticism, however, remained as lucid and incisive as ever, and he himself, the literary personage, experienced a kind of flowering in the last half-dozen years. At age 65, he was something of a sourpuss, whingeing abut the decline of literacy (“You go into an airport bookstore,” he told an interviewer, “and there’s no Updike there”) and feuding with Tom Wolfe.

But when I interviewed him (for the last time) in 2003, he was once again the sly, winking, devilishly clever man of letters who set the standard, for decades, on how to charm the reading public. “If I thought as hard about writing as I do about golf,” he told me, “I might be a better writer—maybe win the Nobel prize.” He didn’t seem so disappointed that his “moment,” as he called it, his chance for a trip to Stockholm, had passed. “How many 71-year-olds win it?” he asked. “Sixties is when they like to give it.”

He was a mildly mischievous gent, wonderful-looking with his long eyebrows and his long nose and wolfish grin. “I’m beyond worrying about aging,” he said, laughing. “I’m so old I can’t age anymore.” He was, as far as I could tell, content.

He once wrote, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” I had thought that he would resist always. But it seems he succumbed.

Adam Begley is editor of the Observer Review of Books. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

To get to the analysis of the speech, skip Mr. Raban’s rather long warm-up (an overview, aimed at British readers, of inaugurations past, followed by a brief introduction to Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter); proceed directly to the paragraph in which he declares that many of Mr. Obama’s phrases “had the dull patina of silver that has jingled in dead presidents’ pockets.” In the next paragraph Mr. Raban refers to “somewhat moth-eaten metaphors”—and for a moment it looks like a harsh review.

And then comes the twist:

“What needed to be said had to be phrased in language as well-worn and conventional as possible, to give the illusion of smooth continuity”—even as Mr. Obama, in a notable deviation from precedent, categorically rejected “the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous occupant of the White House.”

Mr. Raban believes that Mr. Obama’s address—couched in “familiar and emollient language”—“is as near as George W. Bush has come to being impeached.”

In other words, the moth-eaten metaphors were just a ploy—and Mr. Raban’s review is a rave.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FORWARD to the day when we can contemplate Cuba without wincing at the thought of Camp Delta. When that day comes—less than a year from now, with any luck—the title of Richard Fleming’s delightful travel book, Walking to Guantánamo (Commons, $27), will lose its inapt political overtones.

Mr. Fleming, a New Yorker in his late 30s who feared he was on the brink of a nasty midlife crisis, set out to walk from one end of Cuba to the other, west to east, a plan he nursed for five years before actually taking the first step. An integral part of the plan, of course was to write a book about his adventures.

Charmingly candid and laid back, resolutely friendly with the Cubans he encounters and always ready to complain to the reader about blisters and bad knees and other aches and pains, Mr. Fleming is refreshingly post-ideological—he has no agenda other than the urge to scratch the itch of his curiosity.

Walking to Guantánamo offers a view of the island entirely free from the “political venom” that poisons perspectives on both sides of the Straits of Florida. You won’t be perhaps surprised to hear that Mr. Fleming experiences a “gradual, almost osmotic, personal disillusionment with Castro’s politics”—but that’s in effect irrelevant to his eyewitness report on the daily life of a neighboring nation that’s fabulously foreign.

NOW THAT THE ACADEMY of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ratified Rex Reed’s judgment and guaranteed that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be remembered as a good or even great movie, we can disclose the sad secret behind its success: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, from Tales of the Jazz Age (Juniper Grove, $11.99), is slapdash and unfunny, at once clunky and utterly insubstantial. It’s all premise—there’s no plot and no characterization, and even the prose is lackluster. In other words, the director, David Fincher, and the writers, Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, took from Fitzgerald only an idea (which Fitzgerald had filched, in turn, from Mark Twain) and a pleasantly alliterative title; unburdened, they let imagination roam free.

Consider the compound ironies: Fitzgerald hated Hollywood (“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word?” he asked). His West Coast stint, from 1936 up to his death in 1940, was mostly miserable, and a good deal of the misery was inflicted by a studio (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). I can’t help thinking that his failure as a screenwriter played a part in his rapid decline over those four years. And the flip side: The movie industry has never made a decent film out of any of his books—until now. Success at last … with one of his weaker stories.

Right on time for his bicentennial comes Peter Ackroyd’s biography, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95). I wish I could recommend it—Poe’s bitter, truncated life cries out for a quick, sharp analysis—but Mr. Ackroyd’s slim volume is also shallow and lackluster, alternately timid and pompous, with none of the kinetic energy that drove Poe’s mad, morbid imagination and his terrifyingly lucid ratiocinations.

Part of the problem is that Mr. Ackroyd doesn’t seem to like Poe very much; nor does he seem passionate about the work. He calls him the greatest American prose writer of his time, he admires the technical ability of an author who claimed to calculate his effects to within a millimeter (“consummate control of cadence and of open vowel sounds”), and he notes with respect the pioneering forays into undiscovered genres (detective stories, science fiction), but there’s never a sense that Poe is important to Mr. Ackroyd, a vital influence or a personal favorite.

I can’t say I blame him. Confronted with the bare facts of Poe’s life, you’re bound to feel a strong urge to look the other way. It’s a kind of slow-motion suicide: the train-wreck alcoholism; the marriage to his 13-year-old cousin; the lofty ambitions repeatedly stifled; the ugly literary vendettas; the bizarre romantic betrayals; and always—as a kind of wailing, groaning, haunted-house soundtrack—the relentless, dire poverty.

As for the writing, it’s fascinating, exhilarating but not wholly transfixing. It’ll make your hair stand on end but it won’t stop your heart—unless you happen to be another death-haunted dipsomaniac, at once gloriously romantic and chillingly cynical. Though sometimes lovely, the poetry is slight (Emerson, surely with “The Bells” in mind, dismissed Poe as “the jingle man”); the tales are spellbinding but always somehow flawed, tripped up by tangles of irony; and the criticism is brilliant, bracingly vicious but batty.

The closest I’ve come to identifying the root cause of my dissatisfaction with his tales is a remark by R. P. Blackmur, who observed that Poe has “no grasp of the particular.” It’s true: When he declares that “the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” he has no specific woman in mind—any comely corpse will do.

V. S. Pritchett may be saying something similar when he points to Poe’s redeeming gift for “generalizing morbid experience.” He’s always straining after the universal, taking his own fear, his own longing, his own pain and making it yours and mine and inescapable. “Suffering and guilt are his subjects,” says Pritchett, “to magnify his method.”

That magnification produces powerful effects—witness the enduring worldwide popularity of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado” and a half-dozen others. And yet I wonder whether in this sense, too, Poe has no grasp of the particular. Whole nations revere him, the French first and foremost, but how many individual Frenchmen keep Poe by their bedside?

Perhaps concerned that he hasn’t exactly boosted Poe’s reputation, Peter Ackroyd concludes his biography with a list of writers who honored him. Who wants to argue with Hardy, Kafka, Conrad and Joyce? Poe will be with us, safe to say, for another 200 years.