Updike’s hymn to indomitable life

My Father’s Tears and other Stories

A DECADE or so ago, I read an interview with John Updike that was illustrated with a photograph of the author on a ladder painting his mother’s wooden home in Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or some other rustic setting.

He was in his late 60s at the time, yet here he was, the dutiful son, the Protestant ethic personified in the simple, seasonal labour of preservation, as the generations before him had done.