“In the year of his passing, I have of course been thinking about my interlude with this great American presence — a presence that is now an absence of the same dimensions. And I have been thinking about Updike, and Updike’s art, in the hospitalic setting. Furthermore, our long encounter, in the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre in Mass General, Boston, contained its modest portent, its token omen, of a death foretold.” So writes Martin Amis in a memoir of his meeting with Updike in hospital in 1987, published in The Times. Amis wonders what Updike’s experience and his writing can tell us about the issues  raised by the current healthcare debate in the US. This follows an earlier memoir by longtime Amis buddy Julian Barnes written for the New York Review of Books earlier this year.

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