Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

“A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each.” This is how John Updike, one of the world’s most acclaimed novelists, modestly describes his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. Due Considerations is his sixth collection, and perhaps the most moving, stylish, and personal volume yet. Here he reflects on such writers and works as Emerson, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Colson Whitehead, The Wizard of Oz, Don DeLillo, The Portrait of a Lady, Margaret Atwood, The Mabinogion, and Proust. Updike also provides a whimsical and insightful list of “Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido,” from Pocahontas and John Smith to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; muses on how the practice of faith changes but doesn’t disappear; and shares his reaction to the attacks on 9/11 (in Brooklyn that day, “Freedom, reflected in the street’s diversity and quotidian ease, felt palpable”). Due Considerations proves that John Updike is, as noted in The Boston Globe, “our greatest critic of literature.” Praise for Due Considerations: A New York Times Notable Book “The prose is clean, elegant, exquisitely calibrated. . . . [Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “Updike’s scope is rather breathtaking. . . . When I do not know the subject well–as in his finely illustrated art reviews of Bruegel, D