John Updike died, and it seems impossible for any obituary to do justice to either his remarkable talents or the full range of his work. I tried, in today's Independent, but even across two pages I found I had to leave out certain of his novels (there were twenty-two of them) as well as skim over his non-fiction work (he was a prolific critic and book reviewer), if I was to give any coherent account to his work. What strikes me, and probably any Updike reader, is the consistently high imaginative level of his prose, esepcially in his novels -- his descriptions in particular are inevitably original, even dazzling, and they proliferate effortlessly, as if they simply sprang to mind like stray thoughts.