I think it was Bridget Jones who first came up with the concept of mentionitis: when you fall in love, you can't stop mentioning the name of your beloved. Until recently, I wrote a column about books for this newspaper. I've just checked, and in 75 of them I mentioned one name more than 30 times: John Updike. You do the math. Updike is - as a great writer one can speak about him in the present tense; just as one says that Shakespeare explores the possibility of heroism and that Dickens is a fabulous caricaturist, one should now say that Updike is the greatest writer of his generation - my hero. My last column to be centred on him was about the difficulty of maintaining hero worship in later life - about coming to terms with the realisation that with his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, he was demonstrably no longer a genius. But I know that my adoration of him remained, in truth, intact because, despite there being very little chance of Updike either seeing or having any interest in my opinions, I felt guilty about writing it for weeks.

Let me tell you what a fan of John Updike I am. I have eight signed books, including two signed first editions of Rabbit, Run, and four where a friend, for my birthday, managed via his publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, to get him to sign some rather quaint sticky frontispieces, one of which, stuck lopsidedly into my copy of his greatest work, Rabbit is Rich, says: “To David Baddiel - Keep 'em laughing and good luck with the writing, cheers John Updike.” I have a postcard with his picture on it, bought only two months ago on eBay, which he sent to the chief of police in St Clair Missouri in 1991, inscribed “For Chief Yoder and his felons”. I have an enormous photograph of him sitting under a tree at the Hay Festival, which the producer of Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned sourced from a photograph in Vogue and had framed for me, and which sits in my study. It sits in my study because - symptomatic again of hero worship, of adolescent hope - there is magical thinking going on in my vision of him, a prayer that his presence may inspire my work. I used to arrange his books next to mine on the shelves in the hope that some of his genius might flow between the pages. This was particularly pointless, because my books by that time were, of course, already written.

I never met him. I once went to a reading he gave at the National Theatre, and the queue for signing afterwards was simply too long; and besides, that contact - a hello, and a “Shall I sign it to ...?” felt inadequate. At the event, he read from a very beautiful early short story, A Madman, in which the narrator tells of a stay at a B&B in Oxford, where he and his newly married wife are guided every day through the town by another guest, a pensioner called Mr Robinson, who turns out to be crazy. Updike did not have time to finish his reading, so cut to the end by saying: “In the closing paragraph, they tell him they no longer want his services and he is shocked, but stands on the stairs, waving as they go out, saying something like ‘No blame. No blame.'” When I came home, I reread this story. Updike had got it wrong. In fact, Mr Robinson, having earlier said “No shame”, ends by waving and saying, “God bless. God bless.” So - after about an hour of soul-searching - I wrote a fax (a fax: it was a while ago) to the hotel that I for some reason believed Updike was staying at, and informed him, with much grovelling, of this mistake, saying that I believed that he had been subconsciously rewriting the story in his head while summarising it, and that his new version was, in fact, even more beautiful and resonant. He never replied. Almost definitely, he never got it. It's the closest I've ever come to stalking.

But even though, when I catalogue the fandom like this, it sounds so gauche and embarrassing, the assessment of his work that powers it feels to me more and more correct. Updike is the greatest postwar novelist in English, possibly the greatest of the past century. In America he laboured for much of his time in critical ratings behind Bellow, and then latterly behind Roth, but in fact, in life's work terms, both of these are lesser writers, even though Roth has surpassed him in the past few years.

I'm not, because I've done it obsessively in 30 columns already, going to go into too much detail about why this is true, but it can, I think, be narrowed down to three things. First, the writing. Updike in his prime never writes a tired sentence. Somewhere, in an essay, Martin Amis has written about how, as a prose stylist, one has in the bank one's 20 or so killer similes and metaphors, and in a novel these are carefully sprinkled, deployed perhaps every ten pages or so: except then you read Updike and there are 20 of these on every page, an imaginative fecundity so overpowering, as Amis says, that it makes you suspicious. Second, the complexity, by which I mean complexity of understand- ing about experience: Updike himself was a religious man, philosophically a moralist, and yet in his novels and short stories he presents no judgment, only the most detailed rendering of the human condi- tion. Nobody, in an Updike novel, is ever good or bad, they are simply real; no novelist has ever written more completely against the Amazon-reviewer assumption that characters in books have to be nice. And lastly, and most importantly, there is his focus on the everyday - his mission statement was always, as he said, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. This, in effect, is where his religiousness lies, because for Updike, chopping up lettuce, or driving back from a basketball game, or finding a pigeon feather in a barn all speak of the divine, and thus he writes about them divinely.

This is also why he writes so much about sex. From high-minded critics such as James Wood saying, “What a waste of meaning, what a lifelong distraction has sex been in Updike's work”, to the sniggering, clubbable idiots who this year awarded him a Lifetime Achievement for the Bad Sex Award - what they miss is that Updike, who writes extraordinarily, precisely, and yes, microscopically, about sex, is doing so because sex is where the mundane and the beautiful come together: it is at once the lowest and highest of human activities, the place where filth mingles with love and the animal and the exquisite coexist, and only Updike has truly drawn this out.

There is nothing good to come from his death, except that now maybe a few more people will read him, and perhaps that the time had come for him to stop - as he said, with characteristic humility, in an interview for The Widows of Eastwick, knowing as the rest of us didn't that he had lung cancer, “The world would really be none the worse if I were not to write any more.” And one thing, for me, personally, as a fan. In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby, who when my first novel came out, sent me a lovely note on a postcard with a picture of Updike on it, points out that one of the gratifying things about being known as a fan means that friends associate you with the object of worship; so it is comforting, for him, that when Arsenal win or lose, friends watching the TV or listening to the radio elsewhere think “Nick”, at least for a second. Since Updike died, five or six people, some of whom have never read a word by him, have called to commiserate, making me feel like he was a family member.

I actually found out because Frank Skinner, who is in fact the friend who organised the getting of the autographed stickies from Knopf, phoned me and just said: “Dave. John Updike.” And thus I knew he was dead. Which was devastating, but a small part of me did think: how brilliant that Frank, who I believe has read only two or three novels by anyone in his life (he's a nonfiction man), has thought both to do this, and can communicate it to me so economically. It means that when my friends pass Rabbit, Run in a bookstore they think: David.

As a writer who perhaps more than any other understood the demands of selfhood - “You have,” he said, “to sing your own song in the end” - I like to think that John Updike would have appreciated that small consolation.

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