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On Monday Jan. 26, the day before John Updike died, an image from one of his novels dropped into my thoughts. I was labouring over an essay about writing and optimism – a fiendish assignment guaranteed to silence any writer who is not, alas, John Updike. The image was of a column of bubbles rising up a glass and disappearing into the air, and it comes from his novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. Updike uses it as a metaphor to describe the moment when one of his characters, a 44-year-old Presbyterian minister, loses his faith in God: “The sensation was distinct – a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward.”

Nine years ago, the image had come up in conversation with Updike when a book tour brought him to Toronto. I was co-host of the TVOntario show Imprint, and the author had uncharacteristically agreed to an interview. A looong interview – 60 minutes, edited down to a half-hour broadcast. An eternity in TV time. Many long minutes in which to screw up.

There was some mischief in play in this decision to do TV. The novel is a grimly comic, deliciously literal portrayal of a late-20th-century America that has lost interest in God's heaven, and worships the media and movie stars instead. Not the most original thesis, but religion, sex and art have been Updike's enduring subjects, and this novel tackles all three, with his customary elegiac relish and old-fashioned Dutch-master realism.

The story follows three generations of an American family – a defeated minister, his postman son and his ascendant grandson, who escapes to Hollywood. The novel ends with a Waco-like cult going up in flames, as reported on the 6 o'clock news. The end of the world, on TV. No wonder Updike looked so puckish when he walked into the Sutton Place suite where the interview was being taped.

I was beside myself with nerves; Updike had been a literary hero of mine since my college days, when he was the topic of a brow-furrowed 50-page senior essay, the magnum opus of my graduating year. In 1968, he had published “only” nine books, including Rabbit, Run, the first of a tetralogy of novels, two of which would earn him Pulitzer Prizes. But at the time, I was concerned he might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

Talk about loss of faith: Updike went on to publish more than 50 books of fiction, verse, essays, memoir, short stories and criticism. “The world is the host; it must be chewed,” Updike wrote in an early book, The Music School. He did this by writing, and writing, and writing. As he said three months ago, in one of his last interviews, “I've become a beast of the written word, a monster of a kind, in that it's all I can do.”

When he and his publicist arrived, my first impression was that Updike was above all a good-humoured man, still mildly compensating for an adolescence of psoriasis, too much intelligence and shyness. His thin face was distinctive, long-nosed and ruddy, with cat-whiskery white eyebrows. At 67, he was a bit thin in the haunches but otherwise gave an impression of vitality.

As any Updike reader knows, nothing escaped his eye, not a chin hair or a shoelace tip. What the hell do you wear to interview the guy? I finally settled on a black suit and a white shirt – something font-like and typographic. He was wearing a writerish sports jacket in New England hues. The producers sat the two us of down toe and to toe, and as they fiddled with the lights, Updike gave me a complicitous smile and looked down at my feet.

“I like your shoes” he said, inspecting the rather Victorian, ankle-high, lace-up black boots I wore. It was January or February. “It's hard to find footwear that works in this weather and in … situations like this.”

We began talking about a career that had included an early stint at art school in Oxford, several years as a staff writer for The New Yorker, a young marriage that came apart in midlife (and was portrayed in an unforgettable short story, Divorce, that ran in The New Yorker) and small-town, churchgoing life in Massachusetts. He was genial and made the job easy. I thought I detected the shadow of a stutter in his speech. It was revelatory to see this maestro of fluency push through certain hesitations.

Then we came round to In the Beauty of the Lilies, with its portrait of a diminished and exhausted America desperate for new graven images and celestial bodies onscreen. In novel after novel, Updike was gripped by the venal drift of American culture. Like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, the other great white “hairy-chested male writers” (a bygone category in which Updike included himself), he chronicled a culture whose virility and belief in the future were on the ropes. He wrote about sex with a conflicted Protestant obsessiveness and a wariness of women that was reflective of that generation, and uneasily true.

In short, we talked about ideas and themes, but it was only when I mentioned that one metaphor, the column of dark, sparkling bubbles, that Updike became truly animated. “Yes, that was how the book began,” he said, his fingers bubbling in the air. “I don't know … the image just came into my mind …” For a moment, his remarkable eloquence deserted him and he was just remembering what it was like to write. And then we returned to the business at hand.

Marni Jackson is a Toronto journalist and author, and chair of the Literary Journalism Program at the Banff Centre.