Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike’s prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike’s professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: “to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring – an anti-virtue where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.”