The late U.S. author John Updike wrote such celebrated novels as Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux and Couples. (Jim Cooper/Associated Press)

It’s difficult to believe that John Updike is no longer with us. His writing has been ubiquitous for the past half-century. Not only did he produce more than a book a year (including 23 novels), but any U.S. periodical you might have picked up off the rack, from Rolling Stone to the American Association of Retired Persons magazine, may well have presented his well observed, elegantly honed prose.

Updike had his preoccupations — particularly “the American Protestant small town middle class,” as he told Life magazine in 1966 — but he never resorted to formula.

He also kept himself in circulation physically: as recently as last November, the mighty bestseller and literary legend was still submitting himself to the rigours of book tours. He wasn’t particularly keen on interviews, having once said, “There’s a risk you run when you meet your readers.” Updike recalled that when he himself was introduced, as a young writer, to his hero, James Thurber, he “came away less enchanted than if I’d never met him.”

Yet when I had the chance to interview Updike on one of his later tours, he left me with the sense that the generousness of spirit and imagination found in his books were characteristics he himself possessed in abundance.

As a lowly member of the foreign press (writing for the Globe and Mail) at the Hay Festival in Wales in 2004, I was promised an audience with Updike for only a few minutes at the very end of his visit — as he walked from a signing at the festival’s bookstore to the parking lot, from which he would be spirited out of town by a chauffeured car.

As I waited that evening in the bookstore, I spoke to his wife, Martha, who, like me, was loitering about with waning patience as Updike made small talk with a depressingly long queue of eager readers stretching out of the store and into the night. Martha Updike was unimpressed by the demands of readers, who hoisted stacks of books onto the table for her husband to sign, as well as by the festival’s organizers, who had crammed Updike’s schedule so tight he didn’t have the time to change, or even freshen up, between events.

Martha’s concern with the public need for her 72-year-old husband to be constantly on was balanced by a resigned, loving acceptance of his doggedness to do so. Despite widely published reports that Updike worked six days a week, Martha explained that he never voluntarily took a day off from writing and editing. If that was the case, I wondered to myself, where would he find the time to experience enough of life to fuel his fiction? My answer came when Updike stretched out his long, slender frame for our brief walk.

(Ballantine Books)

I felt faintly ridiculous, not to mention cruel, sticking a tape recorder in Updike’s face without his having been able to collect his thoughts. But he seemed to find the idea of an ambulatory interview amusing: “It’ll be a good experiment, won’t it?” As we walked, he returned the compliments of passing well-wishers, vigorously sniffed a white rose he’d been given by the festival, commented on the lively events around him (“What’s going on in that tent, do you think? I hear, cheers, singing — it’s like a Welsh beer fest”) and conversed in long, winding sentences — much like his prose — about overarching themes in his work.

Here was a man who could hold an awe-inspiring amount of information in his brain and yet remain hungry for more. Clearly, this state of mind fed his descriptive powers. If a future society wanted to recreate our contemporary world from the work of one writer — including the complexity of nature and of the built environment — they could do far worse than to choose Updike. Likely he’d give them no small insight into our psychology as well.

His dispensing of detail was always shaded by the desires and disappointments of his characters, like the frustrated Rabbit Angstrom in shabby, small-town Pennsylvania: “His downstairs neighbor’s door across the hall is shut like a hurt face. There is that smell which is always the same but that he can never identify; sometimes it seems cabbage cooking, sometimes the furnace’s rusty breath, sometimes something soft decaying in the walls” (from Rabbit, Run, 1960) Or there’s the impoverished romantic Tristão on Copacabana’s beach in Rio de Janeiro: “So strongly did the December sun strike down that small circular rainbows had kept appearing in the spray of the breakers, out there beyond the bar, all about the boy’s sparkling head, like spirits” (from Brazil, 1994).

In recent years, some of his writing took on a valedictory quality. In a poignant essay he published this past November in the American Association of Retired Persons magazine, he wrote of the aging brain’s “diminishing neurons” and his increasing frustration with the craft: “With ominous frequency, I can’t think of the right word.” For a writer who had spent his life developing a lyrical, fecund style, the ebbing away of his facility must have been devastating. Nonetheless, Updike concluded the piece with typical verve, evoking the “irrational hope that the last book might be the best.”

The young John Updike enjoyed early success as a novelist and short story writer. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

As we stood in the parking lot on that day in 2004, I asked him about the first novel he published, The Poorhouse Fair (1959). The book assumes the point of view of a 94-year-old protagonist in a nursing home. Having been only 27 when he wrote it, did Updike feel he’d gotten it right? Updike admitted that he had made “a few changes” to The Poorhouse Fair for a new edition, but the characters, to him, were “perfectly persuasive.”

“Old people aren’t terribly different from youngish people,” he said, “except that they become more formulaic in the way they talk.”

Updike had his preoccupations — particularly “the American Protestant small town middle class,” as he told Life magazine in 1966 — but in his prose, he never resorted to formula. He wrote with the same devotion about black magic (in The Witches of Eastwick and this year’s sequel, The Widows of Eastwick ) as about “refinishing wood floors” (the occupation of his protagonist in the short story The Full Glass, published last May in The New Yorker).

His friendliness, at a time when he must have been bone-weary, likely resulted in part from professionalism, but this quality, in him, went hand-in-hand with an openness to experience. Updike projected the sense that he could learn something from any interaction with the world, or those around him. His capacity to “give the mundane its beautiful due,” as he famously wrote about his craft, arose from his ability to recognize the beautiful in the mundane.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.