Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of