Updike appears to depend heavily on imagery to set both tone of setting and character:
Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside cafe for coffee. Somehow, though he can’t put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure. At the counter, middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into straws of gray ice-cream sodas. p. 36)
While some readers may find this an overdose, I love the color and movement the words evoke. The place, the people, all telling of who and what they are and what makes them foreign to Rabbit.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology