Words: frontal, adj.

SOME OF us could see John Updike on the front of Motor-Cycle News and immediately buy it. His is a seemingly effortless take on a changing world, caught - over 40 years - in prose as erudite as that of Wodehouse or Nabokov. His new volume, Bech at Bay, returns to his alter ego Henry Bech, and, within a few pages, we find him in conversation with the wife of the American ambassador to Czechoslovakia, of whom she avers, ". . . after a couple of years with Dick, nothing embarrasses me; he's just very outgoing. Very frontal."

The usage is absent from the Random House American Slang - and from the OED, which allots Updike 110 quotations, but most of these, 69, come from the untypical The Coup, and most of the others from Couples. More work needed there.