Updike

Gonna try to be brief about this but this guy's death needs mentioning.

Count me among those who drank in Updike's portrayals of the sex-centered male existence and, not unlike AC/DC's music, made me feel OK thinking and feeling some of the things I think and feel.
My first encounter with Updike was as a teen reading A&P, which I found confusing and intriguing much in the same way I encountered most adult fiction at the time. What did I miss, I wondered at the time, reading it again and again.

Later on I latched onto the first three Rabbit books, discovering devices for Scene that didn't bore me to tears, as well as a male character who I might not have been friends with but whose soul I could identify. I felt Updike was writing about the inner crud that swirls inside many white men -- particularly those with flimsy cultural backbones and family structures, not unlike myself -- yet who are compelled to "buck up" and march (and sometimes stomp) ahead with our lives, knowing that not all feelings can be spared ... including our own.

Can't say I'm a major student of his work -- not much of a student of any author, in fact. There's just too many good ones to latch on too strongly to any in particular. But I've read enough to know we lost another master.