As a friend of mine put it to me, it seemed as if Updike would always be there, like the sea. To reading him, on and off, for close to fifty years (!), was to make contact with some enduring American pain in the heart of the glitter. At his best--the Rabbit series and many stories--he was an avatar of the trouble looming just beneath the skin of normality, and a curious soul trying to keep up. At his funniest--the Bech books--he was as the embodiment of good-hearted WASP playfulness. He narrated his way through enough of the collective life to deserve an enduring place.

And yet. Something went still and cold in him in the face of big tragedy, and it was this, I think, that keeps him out of the company of the American indispensables. His version of David Koresh (In the Beauty of the Lilies) was stillborn.

To me, his failure was exhibited in two frivolous descriptions of New York at and just after the moment of its horror in 2001. Here are excerpts from the two:

In The New Yorker, just afterward:

as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building's roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling.

That "tinkling shiver" was a blunt failure of observation and nerve, I thought, a breakdown of the tragic sense, though I thought so much more intensely close to the events, which seemed to require so much more of the deepest writing.

And then, a few weeks later, in the New York Review, came this extremely odd, even evasive beginning to a piece about a Bruegel show:

It felt not too strange, flying down from Boston a month to the day after the World Trade Center disaster, braving the beefed-up security in the city's disgraced Logan Airport (tall state troopers in blue jodhpurs and diagonal belts, pink-cheeked boys in reserve camouflage outfits, grizzled cops squinting at a long day of light duty, the same old security personnel galvanized by a new sense of mission as they waved their peepy wands), gazing down on the widespread loveliness of a Connecticut whose trees were glowing with autumnal red, approaching New York by a wary new route well away from the Hudson and maimed Manhattan, coming into LaGuardia over more golf courses than I had ever known existed in Westchester County, and taking a taxi (the driver bitterly complained of his month of diminished fares) to the fine little Bruegel show at the Metropolitan--

"Not too strange"? What was he trying to say, or not to say, from all that distance? It felt to me then, and still does, that Updike's fine instruments did not enable him to take the measure of enormity the way Faulkner, and Ellison, and Bellow, and Mailer, and Roth at their best could do, and in that way he remained an outsider to the huge awful stories.

Still, he did not give up striving to see more clearly. His Terrorist was a surprisingly vivid attempt to create an Islamist. I'd love to have seen what he would have done with Obama.