by John Updike.

Knopf. 703 pages. $40.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

This is the kind of mammoth tome — ebulliently stuffed with 62 book reviews, essays on cars and poker, China and life at The New Yorker; introductions to works by Hawthorne, Emerson, James, and Thoreau; The Wizard of Oz and Charlotte’s Web; sex and sensibility as well as Pranesi’s Carceri and William Steig’s cartoons — that you leap into, weaving in and out, reading back and forth, often dazzled by Updike’s insights, turns of phrase, and congenial tone.

Updike neither dismisses nor promiscuously celebrates artists and their work but probes, summarizes, and scans them. As one of Updike’s commentators suggests, this is “not criticism at all, yielding ‘but enhanced understanding of the writer, and his or her preoccupations.’ ” This makes good sense, considering Updike’s generous notion that “To this day I don’t read a book without finding something in it to admire and covet.”

Updike pounces politely. The writer, Michael Ondaatje, “is better at showing withheld emotions than declared ones, like Joan Didion, another laconic, lapidary exponent of the higher hugger-mugger.” A.S. Byatt’s fiction “has the seraglio opulence, the feeling of a flat design luxuriantly filled.” Don DeLillo appears as “always a concept-driven writer, whose characters spout smart, swift essays at one another.” And Salman Rushdie’s stylistic overflow becomes “a sparkling, voracious onrush, each wave topped with foam, each paragraph luxurious and delicious, but the net effect [is] perilously close to stultification.”

Artworks delight him: “My psyche is such that looking at most graphic art makes me happy.” He enjoys the lines and curves, the contours of a cartoon, having once longed to join the ranks of a James Thurber or Saul Steinberg.

Updike is the kind of writer who stays within the lines. He takes the world as it is, luminous and perilous, and within his often claustrophobic realism, searches out the incandescent epiphany, the startlingly lyrical one-liner, the momentary rescue from such a realm in sex, sports and art. His lines make the world shimmer like a Dutch painter’s eye, while leaving it intact, as if skating delicious curlicues on gleaming ice. I sometimes hunger for a deeper plunging, a more irascible edge, perhaps a bit more bite than glide.

But he has his discerning vision: “Adulthood strives to right the imbalances of childhood, and to soothe its terrors.” The soothing often transcends the scarring.

Art, for Updike, remains “inconsolable; it probes the God-shaped hole in the universe like a tongue compulsively seeking the soft-rimmed crater of an extraction.” True, but at times the writing suggests more Novocain than pain.

That said, his “take” on other writers is always judicious, never mean-spirited. His craft sparkles in its lucid, arresting prose, and you come away feeling you’ve learned more about another writer’s craft and vision than before.

“We look to fiction for images of reality — real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply.” Updike bounteously supplies it all.