Controlled rapture …

… "Updike" reviewed by William Deresiewicz| New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Updike strikes me as the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered. The time will come—in thirty or fifty or a hundred years—when the values of our own effulgent age will seem as odious as those of the 1950s (or for that matter, of the 1850s) do to us today. No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote. They will turn to him—
readers will, and writers, I think, especially will—for what is permanently valid in his work: the virtuosity of his technique, his ability to craft a sentence, a scene, a story, to calibrate tones and modulate effects; the penetration of his eye, his gift for seeing things and seeing into minds; his brave, honest, unembarrassed frankness; and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose.

Well, he's sure got people thinking about him.