Remembering John Updike and His Sense of Place

Tom Swick: Contemplating and celebrating the world of travel

01.27.09 | 4:57 PM ET

With great sadness I heard about the death of John Updike. There was not a single travel book in his oversized oeuvre, yet in his novels he captured the spirit of places—New England, eastern Pennsylvania, southwestern Florida—with remarkable insight and dazzling style.

Shortly after hearing the news I went to my bookshelves, pulled out “Rabbit At Rest,” and found our hero at the airport, waiting for his son and imagining being on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, “the whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them.”