John Updike has been considered one ofAmerica's most important fiction writers since the publication of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959. Critics generally categorize him as a witty writer from the New Yorker school, acute in his observations and accurate in his diction. His work as a novelist is well respected among his peers. A survey done by the Sunday Times ofLondon in 1994, asking a group of distinguished British writers who they thought was the greatest living novelist writing in English, ranked Updike second. (Saul Bellow, another American, ranked first.) James A. Schiff, who reports those survey resul ts in his book John Updike Revisited, goes on to list the things that Updike's detractors hold against him: "he writes about the white middle class and epitomizes the comfortably smug white male;" and "he allows his white male protagonists to think or make derogatory statements about...