John Updike

I've not read much by John Updike and felt like I should do something about that so I picked up the four books in the Rabbit series recently. Last night I opened "Rabbit, Run" and was awed by the opening few sentences. Here they are:

"Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."

Updike has built a complete scene with such economy yet still managed to make it feel voluptuous. I especially love that third sentence - so poetic, yet cinematic too. Studying those few sentences is a master class in fiction, folks.