My phone beeped at supper time last Tuesday. It was an SMS from one of my sons. “John Updike RIP” was all it said. Then my inbox pinged: a message from an old friend in Holland. Then a tweet from Steven Johnson appeared in my Twitter feed. All over the English-speaking world it was the same. People were registering the loss of a significant presence in their intellectual lives.

“The Updike opus is so vast”, wrote Ian McEwen in the Guardian later in the week,

“so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more. He was intensely private, learned, generous, courtly, the kind of man who could apologise for replying to one’s letter by return of post because it was the only way he could keep his desk clear.”

The New Yorker, which was, in a way, the fixed point in his life as an essayist, had a nice feature in which writers remembered Updike. Julian Barnes, as usual, was spot on:

“Like many others, I’ve regularly taken Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice” with me to Venice, and regularly failed to read a word of it there. That reader’s hoped-for matching of text to place frequently disappoints. But once, a dozen or so years ago, it worked miraculously for me. I was setting out on a three-week book tour, crisscrossing America. At Heathrow I bought “Rabbit, Run” and started it on the plane. All reading problems became reading joys for the entire trip. I picked up each succeeding volume in a new city, my bookmarks the stubs of boarding cards. The novels were a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life. When I managed to escape my professional duties and strolled the urban or suburban streets, I saw Rabbitland everywhere. Even those moments of stunned exhaustion in a new hotel room, when I had the energy only to turn on the television, interacted with my reading, since Updike loves to counterpoint national events (that is, national events as absorbed by Rabbit through television) against the private life of this archetypal twentieth-century American citizen. My book tour finished in Florida – which was perfect, since this was where the fourth volume found “Rabbit at Rest,” in geriatric condo-land. Poor old Rabbit died, the novel ended, and so did my trip. I flew home (and have no memory of what I read on the plane that time) not only convinced that the quartet is the great masterpiece of postwar American fiction but wondering whether I would ever again find such perfect circumstances in which to read it.”

Like most of his readers, I can remember how Updike’s writing fitted into my life. Couples, for example, coincided with my early married life in Cambridge, providing an insight into mores that we knew were — somewhere — in the air. (We used to hear rumours of parties at which — at the end of the evening — people would throw their car keys into a jar and then go home with whoever drew them out. Nobody ever invited us to such functions, so we relied on Updike’s chronicle of suburban adultery for circumstantial detail.)

Years later, in preparation for my first trip to the US, I embarked — rather as Julian Barnes had — on the Rabbit books, and found myself hooked. And enlightened. James Joyce used to say that if Dublin were destroyed, the city could be rebuilt by consulting the pages of Ulysses. My feeling about the Rabbit books was that they fulfilled much the same function for 1950s – 1980s small-town America. Indeed I remember once coming across a PhD thesis which examined the accuracy of Updike’s portrayal of social changes in suburban America and found it to be very perceptive. His decision for example, to make Harry Angstrom a used-car dealer was particularly astute: automobiles are pretty central to an understanding of American culture, and Updike spotted the significance of Toyota long before Detroit woke up to the danger that the Japanese car manufacturers represented. In one of the features marking his death, the Guardian ran a very nice audio interview in which he talks about the Rabbit series.

In other small ways, his experiences resonated with mine. I was intrigued to discover from his autobiography, for example, that his life had been shaped in some small but not insignificant way by the fact that he suffered, as I do, from psoriasis. And he wrote beautifully about golf, the only game I have ever loved.

I met him once. It must have been in the 1980s, on a wet winter’s morning in Cambridge. He was neatly attired in classic Wasp gear: button-down shirt and tie, subtle tweed jacket, grey trousers, nicely-polished shoes. He had come to Heffers to sign books, and for some reason very few people had turned up. So he sat at a table in the mezzanine which is now used for DVDs, courteously signed the odd book for passing customers, and chatted to me. I had my Leica with me and took some very nice pictures, including a striking one of him smiling, over his spectacles, at a customer. But the print and the negative are locked away somewhere in an attic and I haven’t been able to summon up the courage to go rummaging for them. Sigh.

For anyone who aspires — and struggles — to write, Updike was an exasperating phenomenon: unbelievably prolific, and yet never shoddy. When the news came of his death I pulled down my copy of Odd Jobs (see picture) — a collection of reviews and essays written over a few years in the interstices of writing a series of major novels. It runs to 914 pages! But it’s the title that really rankles, implying as it does that this is stuff he did before breakfast.

“He said he had four studies in his house”, wrote Martin Amis in Wednesday’s Guardian,

“so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence.

I’ve seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called ‘pressure on the cortex’. It’s as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption.”

I benefited from being drenched by that spring. Not many writers have such a capacity to get under one’s skin and into one’s consciousness. “Several times a day”, wrote Amis,

you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself ‘How would Updike have done it?’

You do indeed. May he rest in peace.

I’ve been to Davos once — long before the ‘World Economic Forum’ turned it into a synonynm for nonstop ego-massaging and billionaire-worship. It was in the late 1970s and I was walking in the Alps. I stumbled on the town more or less by mistake on a day that was too foggy to walk. I remember a drab place in which I bought — of all things — a Swiss Army knife and a walking stick that I still possess.

The event itself is nauseating enough. But what is even worse is the creepy sycophancy of the journalists who manage to cadge an invitation to the event. These are creatures who have apparently lost sight of the ancient investigative principle that behind every fortune lies a crime. One expects little better from the old-media print and broadcast crowd, of course. But what’s been increasingly depressing in the last two years is that they have been joined by a tribe of bloggers and twitterers who also seem to have lost their capacity for detachment. At any rate, their schoolgirlish excitement at being allowed into the hallowed precinct seems to have lobotomised their detachment.

So it was nice to open the Guardian this morning and find Julian Glover’s lovely dispatch from the benighted Swiss resort.

Perhaps it was the party at the end of the universe. Just as a neutron bomb destroys life while leaving structures intact, so Davos goes on, while the culture that supports it is dead. As collective belief was what propelled this global elite, one person’s self-importance feeding another’s, the mood has been broken as badly as the banks.

But

Alarm is not the same as contrition, and few people here will admit to have done anything personally wrong. The boss of JP Morgan Chase, James Dimon, is an exception: “I take full blame, yes. God knows some very stupid things were done.”

There is no real sense of collective guilt, or serious consideration of what to do next, other than rebuild the world that has just been lost. Davos has the air of a crash inquiry into an airline that intends to keep on flying. One hero, alone among thousands, suggested that the bankers should simply be jailed until they give the money back.

The problem with that is that most of them have no money to return. The ocean on which the global boom floated has evaporated.

[…]

The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think that means they should be less important or less rich. Yet for many the modesty is a temporary veil, to be worn until the good times return.

It is hard to tell who has really suffered, and who is only pretending. In a dark corridor at the centre of the concrete congress building billionaire surnames still flash past on white badges. This is a town where the men have the telltale signs of the seriously rich. Their hair has been blow-dried into implausible waves and layers; coiffures disciplined, even if the markets are not.

Great stuff!

Thoughtful list by Timothy Garton-Ash.

On the evidence we have so far, the following could plausibly be asked to interrogate themselves on their share of the responsibility. With the exception of the first and last categories, the words “some of the” should be inserted before each heading. My list is, of course, merely indicative.

Crooks. Bernie Madoff was (it appears, subject to the finding of the courts) a crook, a fraudster and a confidence trickster. His like will always be with us. The relevant question is how he was able to get away with it for so long and on such a scale.

Bankers. Some highly respected and law-abiding bankers took huge gambles and made horrible miscalculations at our expense, themselves walking off with multimillion bonuses while leaving shareholders and taxpayers to pick up the tab. Others did not.

Regulators. There’s a lot of failure to go around in this category. “Is that a typo?” one official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission was said to have asked, when faced with the $50bn estimate for Madoff’s losses. “Isn’t that number meant to be $50m?”

Politicians. It’s all very well for politicians to rail against “Wall Street” and the “banksters”, but this happened on George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s watch. “The cheerleaders of finance,” writes the Economist’s Edward Carr in his report, “were unwilling to admit that houses were too expensive and risk too cheap.” Yes, but so were the cheerleaders of British and American politics.

Economists. Here’s a guild from which we might usefully hear a little more self-criticism – especially from the quantitative economists whose mathematical models helped to lead investment bankers astray. In what sense can economics still claim to be a science if its predictive capacity is so low? Imagine Newtonian physics when apples start going upwards.

Journalists. Yes, a few warned, as did a few exceptional economists like Nouriel Roubini; but it’s only now that your average reader of the business pages is in a position to understand how risky his or her investments were. Did business journalism fail us?

We, the people. Some of us, anyway: piling up household debt, especially in Britain and America, on the back of inflated house prices that gave the illusion of security; not asking sufficiently probing questions about where our pension funds were invested.

The system. Blanket charges against some denatured, depersonalised “system” usually betray incoherence wrapped in indignation. But there is a sense here of a global financial system that had become so large, complex and untransparent that it was beyond the capacity of even the largest actor in the markets to understand, let alone control. And one in which apparently rational decisions by most individual participants produced a result collectively damaging for all.

That just about covers it. Garton-Ash’s argument is that the temptation to kick ‘Davos Man’ because he got us into this mess should be resisted. Why? because Davos Man was a globaliser — a “ruthless cosmopolitan”. But he may have been the lesser of two evils. “Now we are at a crossroads”, concludes G-A.

One road leads back to economic nationalism, protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Another leads forward to more international co-operation, including more regulation and transparency. Without a conscious effort, the dynamics of both democratic and undemocratic politics, which remain national, will lead us down the former road. Inside Davos Man, there is his predecessor and possible successor always struggling to get out. If you don’t like what you’ve seen of Davos Man, wait till you see Nationalist Man get to work.

Nice column.