The Revival of Laughter

A nice bit from a review of a posthumous collection of John Updike's essays:

His own word-pictures — of events remembered, books read, pictures seen, games played, loves grasped and relinquished — are among the gifts of our literature. “Perhaps,” he writes in an essay on humor, “one reason we laugh so much in childhood is that so much is unexpected and novel to us, and perhaps fiction revives that laughter by giving us back the world clearer than we have seen it before.”