Column by David in The Times.

I think it was Bridget Jones who first came up with the concept of mentionitis: when you fall in love, you can’t stop mentioning the name of your beloved. Until recently, I wrote a column about books for this newspaper. I’ve just checked, and in 75 of them I mentioned one name more than 30 times: John Updike. You do the math. Updike is – as a great writer one can speak about him in the present tense; just as one says that Shakespeare explores the possibility of heroism and that Dickens is a fabulous caricaturist, one should now say that Updike is the greatest writer of his generation – my hero. My last column to be centred on him was about the difficulty of maintaining hero worship in later life – about coming to terms with the realisation that with his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, he was demonstrably no longer a genius. But I know that my adoration of him remained, in truth, intact because, despite there being very little chance of Updike either seeing or having any interest in my opinions, I felt guilty about writing it for weeks.

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Column by David in The Times.

This is my first column of 2009. It’s also my last. And not just of 2009. It’s been a pleasure, being given the chance to witter on about books every fortnight, but I’ve done it for just over three years and, having finally admitted, at the end of last year, that my literary hero, John Updike, has jumped the shark with his last book, the time has come for me to lock the Times.doc folder before this column similarly straps on a pair of water skis and heads for hammerhead-infested waters. Always best to leave them wanting more.

How does one end, though? How does one use words to say goodbye in a way that says more than just goodbye? The place to look, obviously, is books. Interestingly, though, classic endlines are far fewer on the ground than openers. For every “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” or “yes I said yes I will Yes” there are five “Call me Ishmael”s or ten “It is a truth universally acknowledged”s.

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