To my surprise, you squeezed John Updike’s obituary into your Books and Arts Section (“An American Subversive,” January 31, 2009). God, sex, and America were his three themes, you claim. A Protestant to his bones and very much a Yankee, you place him in the generation of silent Americans. Would that he was much more silent, though. I remember reading one of his novels in the late Sixties, but I do not remember which one. Or what it was about, if anything. I remember going to a lecture of his in the late Seventies, but I do not remember a word he uttered. Or the color of his voice, if any. Having read your near-obituary, I searched through my own writings for his name. As it turned out, he has left no trace in thirty-four years’ worth of ruminating about everything under the sun. When I go back to that dreary lecture of his, all I can see in my mind’s eye is a wizened face of a retired small-town lawyer or dentist. An American subversive, my ass.