Updike? He can do pretty much anything

Once the reader grasps that somehow, in between writing fiction and continuing to read extensively, John Updike produces an exhausting amount of prose for publication extending far beyond the pages of his second home, The New Yorker, it then becomes possible to read this huge volume of gems and oddments, and wonder. Wonder at the diversity - from ageing Baby Boomers to sun-tanning, world literature to cartoons - the relaxed though meticulous erudition, the energy, the natural curiosity, compassion and, above all, the professionalism of a journeyman writer relentlessly at work who rarely says `no'.

Urbane and civilised, Updike, chronicler of middle-class America, invariably succeeds in being polite while remaining honest and opinionated. If he has never quite managed to shake off the youthful glow of being the cleverest boy in the class, it is probably because this Harvard summa cum laude, who will be 68 in April, is still precisely that, as well as, of course, being one of America's truly great writers, although he is neither Jewish nor Southern. His finest fiction showcases a prose style which, at its best, is glorious. Yet Updike, when functioning as literary journalist, seldom allows it to upstage his assessments or arguments.

Most of the articles are about books and the business of reading, which is an extension of living. John Updike certainly is a world-class reader. "I write not criticism but book reviews," he said when delivering a speech in 1987, the text of which is included here. And that is one of the clues to Updike's engagingly honest, unpompous and thorough approach. As a reviewer, he actually reads the books. As may be seen from the many reviews contained in this volume, he reviews as much non-fiction as fiction, and unlike a shameful number of reviewers of biographies, he does not merely paraphrase the life under scrutiny - he assesses the biographer and the book.

Also unusually for such a patrician figure, he reviews his contemporaries with a candour bordering on suicidal courage and is unafraid of criticising Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. His harsh review of Martin Amis's unfortunate, bizarrely unconvincing Night Train in 1997 is already a classic. "I wanted very much to like this book, and the fact that I wound up hating it amounts to a painful personal failure. I wanted to like it because Martin Amis, for all his spectacular talents and fierce dedication, has received a lot of bad press recently." Updike identifies the post-human quality of Night Train, explaining that his real problem with it is "the unmentionable way the plot proceeds". Ever present in Updike's reviews is the fact that he actually cares about the business of writing.

Also included in an "overseas" review section alongside pieces on Brodsky, Ivan Klima, Muriel Spark, the Romanian Norman Manea and Peter Esterhazy, is a curious aside of sorts, "Undelivered Remarks Upon Awarding the 1992 GPA Book Award in Dublin", in which he muses upon having to pick a winner from a shortlist consisting of "two books of poems, two novels, and two works of history".

The winner was, of course, McGahern's Amongst Women which Updike praises as "the tale of a warrior in peacetime" as well as being "at its deepest level about the co-existence of men and women . . . in the novel's weave of many brief scenes the novelist shows himself everywhere knowing and tactful, in language that is both simple and subtle, austere and affectionate. McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth." Updike's reading of the book is exact. It is a pity that neither he nor his editor noticed that McGahern is referred to as "Thomas", and that Eavan Boland's name is mis-spelled.

Among the several essay-length reviews are superb readings of Edith Wharton, Hawthorne, Melville and the first American Nobel Laureate, Sinclair Lewis. Updike is excellent on Wharton's The Age of Innocence, while an article on Dawn Powell, a writer I had never heard of, which stresses "She is too good a fiction writer - too deft, funny, knowing, compassionate, and poetic - to be altogether forgotten, yet is not, in a sense, emblematic enough to be one of the permanent exhibits in the zoo of academically imposed American novelists", will send any reader off to the nearest library, as does his regard for Henry Green.

HIS review of John Cheever's Journals is a powerful example of controlled outrage. Updike knew him and does not conceal his disapproval of their publication, "given the determination to expose the journals at all, less than 10 years after Cheever's death". Objecting to the handling of the material and the focus on Cheever's drinking, obsessive philandering and homosexuality in this "literary event, a spectacular splash of bile and melancholy", Updike calls for the inclusion of the more ordinary entries which may have helped "relieve the superheated, rather hellish impression this selection makes".

Although the review is more than a defence of Cheever, whose work Updike writes about elsewhere, he somewhat uncharacteristically allows his personal feelings to show when admitting the Journals left him wanting to close his eyes. "They tell me more about Cheever's lusts and failures and self-humilations and crushing sense of shame and despond than I can easily reconcile with my memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen arm in arm with his pretty wife. His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the deep gulf between outward appearance and inward condition."

Far less personal, but equally humane, is Updike's unforgiving review of Jeffrey Meyers's sleazily sensationalistic biography of Scott Fitzgerald, a book which Updike brilliantly demolishes on many counts, deciding "the all-but-sneering tone is what is principally wrong with this biography".

Meyers, he writes, "shows his subjects [Fitzgerald, Sheilah Graham, Zelda] no respect. He ransacks their lives." It is a fine essay. Updike balances his reading of a book with insight and obvious background knowledge. Graham Greene, who, he writes, "led a long life full of travels and seductions and problematical elements, poses a bright flame for investigative moths" and so he censures Michael Sheldon's racy study The Enemy Within.

Updike also takes on double Pulitzer Prize-winner David Herbert Donaldson for a determined biography of Lincoln which is scholarly, yet devoid of atmosphere. The review of a life of Helen Keller proves unexpectedly compelling reading. As, indeed, is an off-the-cuff article about the "ultimate studio product", actress Lana Turner. Inspired by her somewhat underplayed death in June 1995, in the week of Hugh Grant's disgrace, Updike's portrait of a tarnished goddess is fascinating. It is followed by a piece on dancer Gene Kelly. His tribute to writer and legendary New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell offers much insight into the editor/writer relationship, particularly if that editor is also a novelist.

There is no doubt that Updike, creator of Rabbit and Bech, whose oeuvre includes Couples, Roger's Version and Toward the End of Time, can do pretty much anything. He loves writing, as the 20 novels, all the stories, poetry and five hefty volumes of subtle, responsible journalism prove. As he has aged, a stronger sense of himself has crept into his non-fiction. Although his fiction has always drawn on his life, he has sustained an aura of privacy. A talented artist, he spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and writes well about art.

Cartoons, though, along with golf, are a special love. "For a long time I dreamed of being a Disney animator," he says here, adding he is five years younger than Mickey Mouse. The son of a high school teacher/deacon father and a mother interested in writing, Updike acknowledges many of his interests were forged in childhood. Of the Rabbit Quartet, Updike acknowledges that Harry's character "gave me access to America, a way in, into the matter of America, as my own persona did not".

Playful enough to create his own Jewish alter ego with writer Harry Bech, Updike's achievement as a fiction writer - dominated by his concerns of sex, God and death - is formidable, if too easily taken for granted. His is a benign rather than a visionary presence, indifferent to gravitas. For all the ease and humour, however, he is capable of intense feeling, as the magnificent story "A Sandstone Farmhouse" - based on his mother - testifies.

Forget about its bulk: More Matters has a great deal to offer. Ordinary life, love and human error continue to interest him. It can only be hoped that Updike's perceptively intelligent genius and lyric prose may yet earn him the Nobel Prize.

Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times staff journalist