Updike’s novel was set in what might be called the optimistic years of the Nixon administration: the time of the Apollo mission and the birth of that all-American can-do expression that begins: “If we can put a man on the moon … ” In January 1971, Senators Kennedy and Javits sponsored the “Conquest of Cancer Act,” and by December of that year Richard Nixon had signed something like it into law, along with huge federal appropriations. The talk was all of a “War on Cancer.”

Four decades later, those other glorious “wars,” on poverty and drugs and terror, combine to mock such rhetoric, and, as often as I am encouraged to “battle” my own tumor, I can’t shake the feeling that it is the cancer that is making war on me. The dread with which it is discussed “the big C” is still almost superstitious. So is the ever whispered hope of a new treatment or cure.

In her famous essay on Hollywood, Pauline Kael described it as a place where you could die of encouragement. That may still be true of Tinseltown; in Tumortown you sometimes feel that you may expire from sheer advice. A lot of it comes free and unsolicited. I must, without delay, begin ingesting the granulated essence of the peach pit (or is it the apricot?), a sovereign remedy known to ancient civilizations but now covered up by greedy modern doctors. Another correspondent urges heaping doses of testosterone supplements, perhaps as a morale booster. Or I must find ways of opening certain chakras and putting myself in an appropriately receptive mental state. Macrobiotic or vegan diets will be all I require for nourishment during this experience. And don’t laugh at poor old Mr. Angstrom above: somebody has written to me from a famous university to suggest that I have myself cryonically or cryogenically frozen against the day when the magic bullet, or whatever it is, has been devised. (When I failed to reply to this, I got a second missive, suggesting that I freeze at least my brain so ...