John Updike was a great writer, and he was also important.  One of the reasons this is so true is because he could never shake a deep religious faith.  Ian McEwan, one of the world’s best writers in English right now (and, by the way, an Atheist), has a lovely tribute to Updike here.  McEwan is my favorite kind of atheist.  He’s incredibly generous, he’s rigorous without being ideological, and he’s comfortable with material explanation without becoming a complete materialist.  Here are his thoughts on Updike and God:

This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to “make the leap of unfaith”. The “weight” of personal death did not allow it, and much seriousness and dark humour derives from this tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.

In a short story from 1984, “The Wallet”, Mr Fulham (who, we are told in the first line, “had assembled a nice life”) experiences death terrors when he takes his grandchildren to a local cinema. While “starships did special-effects battle”, Fulham’s “true situation in time and space” was revealed: “a speck of consciousness now into its seventh decade, a mortal body poised to rejoin the minerals, a member of a lost civilization that once existed on a sliding continent”. This “lonely possession” of his own existence, he concludes, is “sickeningly serious”.

God makes no appearance in this story, but it is unlikely that an atheist could have conjured so much from the minor domestic disturbance that follows. First, a large cheque “in the low six figures”, a return on canny investments, fails to show up in the post. Fulham makes many phone calls to the company in Houston, the matter begins to loom too large - “He slept poorly, agitated by the injustice of it.” He suspects a thief, a “perpetrator”, or there is a flaw in the mindless system. He is tormented by “outrageous cosmic unanswerableness”.