Literature is subject to trends, as is much else in life. While this weary century staggers to its close, it may be argued that no other country has taken as complete a possession of the novel form as has the United States. It is American writers who have most convincingly given life, coherence, expression, realism and authenticity to fiction: they have permitted it to breathe. This international dominance has been well tested by ongoing racial and emerging ethnic tensions from within, never mind the enduring achievement of the 19th-century European novel and the pitfalls of the campus creative writing course. The American literary tradition is extraordinarily diverse - as diverse, in fact, as America. Considering the vast number of gifted American writers as well as the passing whims of fashion and demanding critics, the sustained presence of Saul Bellow and John Updike is all the more remarkable.

Few could dispute Bellow's stature as the chronicler of the confusions of the American Jew descended from Eastern European parents, attempting to secure a place in New York or Chicago - and all the while trying to make sense of the New World. Bellow is the 1976 Nobel Literature Laureate. Updike's position is slightly more hazy, regarded as literary yet at times dismissed as "middlebrow". While Bellow has the gravitas of one burdened by ancient tribal woes, the urbane, detached, multiple-claused Updike always appears to be having too good a time.

For him, writing appears to come so easily - too easily. Such is his almost gymnastically adriot mastery of language, it appears that as a writer, Updike can do more or less as he likes. And he does. His tone is jaunty, his opulent linguistic facility almost wantonly good.

At his best, no one can caress prose as sumptuously as John Updike. No one writes as richly, as imaginatively, or as obsessively, about skin - its secret hues, textures, luminosity, scars and vulnerabilities. Physical sensation is his medium; touch, smell, taste, fear. His prose glides between a formal grace - characters "jubilate" - and the street. It has Biblical rhythms. His vocabulary draws from Elizabethan English as readily as from current slang.

Sex and religion have always been his central themes - one need look no further than his new novel Toward The End of Time (which will be be reviewed on Saturday) - but readers tend to overlook the religion (as well as the proliferation of babies and dogs), concentrating instead on the sex, particularly Updike's hilariously, wickedly graphic explorations of middle-class American adultery. Hardly surprisingly, this apparent preoccupation has diverted academe from recognising Updike as an heir of Nabokov as well as Calvino.

In fact, he is as stylistically close to both of these writers, particularly Nabokov - as he is thematically to the great John Cheever.

Admittedly, Updike's characters are often presented as bored, middle-aged, sexually-rapacious materialistic suburbanites. It is easier to laugh at greedy have-alls or want-alls than doomed romantic heroes. It is also far easier to miss the main point: Updike is writing about life as it is lived by many Americans. His men fantasise about oral sex and the act is endlessly, inventively described. An Updike suburban wife is more concerned with arranging flowers and aerobics than struggling to feed her family. His characters are greedy children, desperate for love in the guise of the definitive sexual high. There are no issues. But then Updike, for all his skill as an informed commentator and essayist, has never been a campaigning novelist. He is an observer who happened on his prey a long time ago. Anyhow, he has always felt sex and religion to be pretty big issues. Always central to his work is the fact that men and women don't really like each other. By concentrating on writing about the individual he has also examined the story of the United States. For all its loud excesses, the Rabbit quartet of Rabbit, Run (1960) Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and the magnificent Rabbit At Rest (1990) all featuring the boorish Harry Angstrom, not only offers a portrait of one man's life, it also looks at some 40 years of American history. The quartet testifies to Updike's mesmerising versatility and ability to infiltrate layers of American society. Critics dismiss Updike's narrators as invariably wryly intelligent characters skilled at intellectualising the physical sensations of sex. In Roger's Version (1986), Roger Lambert, a professor of divinity, speaks some of the sharpest lines Updike has ever written. As does Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Toward The End of Time. These men are thinkers, are undoubtedly educated and middle class - although Ben stresses he came from nothing and "changed my accent". Turnbull's wide-ranging interest in science and history may seem too well developed for a retired investment consultant, but Updike's characters usually possess a sense of history.

History teacher Alfred Clayton, the narrator of Memories Of The Ford Adminis- tration (1992) is preoccupied with his wife, his mistress and his long uncompleted study of James Buchanan, the forgotten 15th president of the US. Recalling watching Nixon's televised resignation, when he was himself newly separated, Clayton describes the sensation of sitting among his children and feeling "less like a villain than like a fourth victim, another child of the gathering darkness (why did Nixon wait until the evening to quit? to avoid looking like a daytime soap opera?)". That novel does, as the title suggests, return to an odd interlude in American political history. Most of Updike's self absorbed characters are still capable of responding to life, specifically the America, which surrounds them. Even old Harry is something of a patriot/philosopher, "Driving is boring" he declares in Rabbit At Rest, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went." Closer to the more general perception of Updike's narrators, is the voice overseeing the excellent short story Deaths Of Distant Friends (from Trust Me, 1987). "A time later," the narrator recalls, "I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, ninety-one, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James as if he has just left the room."

Yet if the standard Updike narrative voice is considered erudite and knowing, where exactly does Harry fit in? Among the many linguistic feats Updike has achieved is the creation of Rabbit's inner world. While the omniscient narrator tells the story, there are many excursions in to the chaotic if interestingly instinctive mind of Updike's legendary American junk-food-ingesting Everyman. "Rabbit liked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the smile, the big shoulders, the way his head kept wagging during the long pauses, the way he floated above the facts, knowing there was more to government than facts, and the way he could change direction while saying he was going straight ahead, pulling out of Beirut, getting cozy with Gorby, running up the national debt. The strange thing was, except for the hopeless down and outers, the world became a better place under him. The Communists fell apart, except for in Nicaragua, and there he put them on the defensive. The guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Harry dares say, `Under Reagan, you know, it was like anaesthesia'. " Elsewhere, Harry watches his grandchild while away a commercial break during Unsolved Mysteries by channel-hopping, "to Jacques Cousteau in a diving suit, to Porky Pig in his bigbuttoned blue vest (odd, those old cartoon animals all going around with bare bottoms) . . . to a courtroom scene where the judge's shifty eyes in a second show that he is in on a deal, a hummingbird beating its surprisingly flexible wings in slow motion, Angela Lansbury looking shocked, Greer Garson looking gently out of focus in black and white, and back to Unsolved Mysteries". Yes, Harry does think. . .

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932 and was educated at Harvard. On graduating in 1954, he spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. Once back home, he joined the staff of The New Yorker and remained on it for two years. Since then, he has been a full-time, professional, jobbing writer. To date he has written 18 novels, nine collections of short stories, enough journalism to run to four volumes, four children's books and the play, Buchanan Dying. Critics say he has written far too much.

Certainly there have been disappointments such as S. (1988) told through a female narrator; Brazil (1994), an awkward variation on Romeo And Juliet; and In The Beauty Of The Lilies (1996) a sprawling family epic spanning four generations and relying far too heavily of a mixed bag of historical and movie references. But at his best Updike is a considerable force - as Roger's Version, the Rabbit books, particularly the final volume, Couples, his classic study of middle-class marriage as an adulterous free-for-all which was published in 1968. There have been many outstanding collections such as Your Lover Just Called (1979), Trust Me (1987) and The Afterlife (1995). Few writers have begun their careers as impressively as Updike did with The Poorhouse Fair in 1958, which explores what it means to be old. Readers still enjoy his subversive, grotesquely inventive romp, The Witches Of Eastwick (1984), A Month Of Sundays (1975) previewed the central concerns of Roger's Version. Despite having created a writer character with Bech, Updike never fell into the self-caricaturing trap which engulfed Philip Roth with his literary alterego, Nathan Zuckerman. Bech emerges simply as a clever portrait of any Jewish writer.

Updike's work has, however, become more autobiographical: the new novel feels very close to life. Much of his work is. Yet, despite the amount he has written, he has never become overly exposed as a person. Self-Consciousness (1989), a sequence of six thematic chapters, is the closest he has come to autobiography. It was mainly intended to defy potential biographers. In person he is funny, friendly and as clever as his books. Even in his 60s, he retains the smile of an evil child under the distinctive floppy, dusty hair. When I interviewed him in 1992 he was courtly, engaging, curious. Long-faced, long-limbed, with long feet and teeth, he gives the impression of being taller than he is. He also continues to exude a sense of being quite the smartest boy in the class. Therein lies both his strength and weakness. On the surface, his work appears to lack the naked passion and despair of many of his peers, but for all the glitter and wit and style there are elegaic moments of breathtaking beauty. Toward the End of Time is about a man coming to terms with death - albeit with humour, much irony and gorgeous descriptions of nature and the changing seasons. Roger's Version began Updike's meditations upon death, which have continued. The grim comedy of the final Rabbit book is laced throughout with the smell of death. Harry is on the run from it. He remarks to his Nelson, his horrible son: "I saw old Dr Morris and he thinks I'm so far gone I should stop eating."

Death, regret and loss dominated his superb collection The Afterlife and are important elements in his eccentric though beautiful new book. Anyone interested in the emotional depth of which Updike is capable should read the story A Sand- stone Farmhouse (from The Afterlife). A man returns to his mother's house after

her death and remembers her as "a young, slim woman dressed in a navy-blue suit, with white at her throat, dressed to go off to her job . . . hurrying to catch the trolley car . . His tears came and kept coming, in a kind of triumph, a breakthrough, a torrent of empathy and pity for that lost young woman running past the Pennsylvania row houses. . . this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind."

John Updike's uniquely American work succeeds because of - rather than in spite of - his cool intelligence, detachment and awesome linguistic range. Behind the humour lies the sensibility of one haunted by death and time.

Toward The End Of Time is published tomorrow by Hamish Hamilton