Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.

But as this last, beguiling collection of stories bears witness, condescending to Updike as the lyricist of small satisfactions misses the power of his great, deep, subject: the pathos of American boyishness; the gap between bright expectation and experience into which the Rabbit Angstroms and the rest fall with their air of desperately bewildered ruefulness.

As they take their plunge, they snatch at whatever action can come to hand – a drive into the night with no particular destination in mind; a fling with a neighbour in a power outage – to postpone the hostile blankness of self-reflection. Updike has often been accused of using women instrumentally, as so many gratifiers of arrested sophomoric urges, but this platitude short-changes his erotic generosity.

and

Updike was better at the elegiac than the catastrophic. But My Father’s Tears, despite the implication of the title story, isn’t all mood indigo. Updike’s genius was for the richly relished, precisely nailed, moment; his incomparable powers of translation between what is observed and what gets fixed in memory: a girlfriend who was all outline “in silverpoint”; a miniature rainbow trapped in an austere Vermont bathroom, refracted from the bevelled edge of its mirror. That was his great offering to his readers. No one else will do the droll shoulder-shrug, the gee-whizzery of bruised American innocence with as much piercing truth. At the end of his lovely concluding tale, “The Full Glass”, you brim with his own gratitude for the dizzy sweetness of life and you return the favour by being thankful that John Updike lived and wrote.

Amen. Despite the recent disappointment with Roger’s Version, I count Rabbit As Rest as one of the best 20 C novels in English – full of the virtues which Schama enumerates in his review.
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Much as I admire Updike, it must be said that it’s hard to find a photograph of him where he isn’t somewhere between genial and smug. The picture, right, is about as pensive and natural as I could find.