Rabbit is gone

• John Updike, 1932-2008.

His settings ranged from the court of ''Hamlet'' to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by ''penny-pinching parents,'' united by ''the patriotic cohesion of World War II'' and blessed by a ''disproportionate share of the world's resources,'' the postwar, suburban boom of ''idealistic careers and early marriages.''

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it ''to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.'' Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's ''chuckling whir'' or look to the stars and observe that ''the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.''