Songs of Himself

“I used to love to hear him talk,” a female friend said to me when I told her I was reviewing the Selected Letters of John Updike. Anyone who has had a long exposure to Updike (my own goes back to the paperback copy of Pigeon Feathers I bought in the mid-1960s) will know what she meant. Updike’s voice, whether on the page or heard orally, was enormously soothing, so much so that it comes as no surprise to learn, in the Letters, that he was once seriously considered for the hosting job on Masterpiece Theater. The comfort of that voice can be traced back to the early stories like “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” with its delicate layerings of class consciousness, the weight of impending adulthood, and the still only mildly threatening hint of adultery. Revisiting them, it’s easy to imagine young readers of The New Yorker, where most of the stories first appeared, feeling themselves flattered by Updike’s view of them: here we are, starting out, well-educated, lucky (most of us), seeing our domestic lives play out, elegantly, in print.