The book should appeal most, he says, to anyone "who used to be pleased by Nabokov's excursions into the semi-real. I'm not Nabokov, and there was much about his fictional world that's a little constraining, but I did love the attitude he brought to the art of fiction, a kind of detached, almost scientific wish to do something new with this form. I don't see that much anymore. The people who write novels now seem to be very serious people who want to sell a million, or make a million at least. . . ."

This brings to Updike's mind his fellow Knopf writer Michael Crichton, whose new novel, Disclosure, zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists within minutes after it hit book stores. That sort of bloated instant success, Updike says, "is something I don't really expect for myself."

And despite a favorable preview in Publishers Weekly, Brazil was sent straight to the chopping block on Tuesday by The New York Times' critic, who savaged it as "ugly, repellent" and "a modern-day soap opera full of racial and sexual cliches" that "does for racial understanding what Mr. Updike's angry, bitter portraits of women in The Witches of Eastwick and S. did for communication between the sexes."

Yet even before that hefty salvo, Updike acknowledged that "there's much in the book to cavil at. But you can't think too much when you're writing about the reaction, either critical or commercial, the book's going to get. You'll get all fumble- fingered."

In fact, John Updike did not set out to be a novelist at all. His father, Wesley, taught high school math, a job that positioned the family on the Shillington, Pa., social ladder just below the best-paid hosiery knitter. Updike's mother, Linda Hoyer Updike, an aspiring writer with a master's degree from Cornell, was an oddity in her conservative, practical community, "where you either made things or you grew things."

Still, "people kind of respected her in a way. That's how it seemed to me. They kind of tiptoed around her. . . . It wasn't that she totally carried on in the teeth of a defiant society."

Mrs. Updike's great hope of publishing a historical novel about Juan Ponce de Leon never materialized, but two short-story collections eventually were published by mainstream houses. The last, The Predator, appeared in 1990, a few months after her death. "One of our last conversations was about some suggestions I had to improve the text," says Updike, "and, you know, she rejected almost all of them."

Updike's own early desire was to be a cartoonist, but he also began writing "light verse, with some unlight mixed in" and at 14 attempted a mystery novel. Published last year in a collection of famous authors' juvenile writings, it begins: "My employer, Manuel Citarro, pushed the letter across the desk at me. It was written in a large, mascueline hand, with no curly- cues and a firm down stroke." At Harvard, where he majored in English and edited the Lampoon, Updike began to write short stories, "but the idea of being a novelist didn't really hit until I was already published in The New Yorker fairly often, and I felt the next step -- if there was to be a next step -- would be to see if I could write a novel."

Willow, a chronicle of growing up in Pennsylvania, foundered. Updike's next effort, written before office hours on 600 sheets of The New Yorker's yellow copy paper, made it as far as a publishing house but not into print. A third try emerged during Updike's first summer in Ipswich. "I took it to Knopf, and to my everlasting delight the editor it happened to hit liked it. And it could have gone very otherwise, because it's not a book for everyone. . . . He called me up and said, 'Oh, I love your novel, wouldn't change a word,' all the things an author wants to hear. And there. I heard them."