When Amis met Updike ...

Of the great postwar American writers, John Updike, who died last week, was the most controversial, for his sexual candour and unblinking portrayal of adultery in middle-class suburbia. In 1987 Martin Amis travelled to Boston for this paper to meet his hero - then near to completing his acclaimed series of 'Rabbit' novels - to talk about wives, literature ... and mortality. Here we reprint the interview in full

I met up with Updike at Mass General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning.

It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. "You know what I look like," he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, "storklike," distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.