In a piece written for The Guardian, Updike biographer Adam Begley noted, and not without some experience, “Widows and biographers don’t get along. . . . To the widow, or widower, or surviving children, any biography that digs deep into the private life of the subject is almost guaranteed to be obnoxious.

“There are exceptions: John Cheever’s family allowed Blake Bailey full and free access to papers they knew (or at least strongly suspected) contained sad and sordid secrets. But it’s a safe bet that any family will want the biographer to focus on public achievements, not private peccadilloes. You can’t libel the dead, but revealing the seamy side, or simply speaking ill of them, invariably causes collateral damage, mostly to descendants but occasionally (think David Foster Wallace) to parents.”

Begley concludes that while “literary lives are tasteful, biographies are not. I know this to be true because when I was writing my biography of John Updike, I always insisted, snobbishly, that it was a book about how Updike’s life shaped his work. I looked down my nose at sensational biographies that aimed to satisfy the prurient curiosity of that mythical creature, the ‘average’ reader. The prospect of digging up dirt, even accidentally, appalled me. It made me squeamish.

“Yet because Updike was a self-confessed serial philanderer, I was repeatedly quizzed—by my friends and his—about his sex life. It was the inescapable topic. I righteously declined to name names, and omitted as many graphic details as I could,” he writes. “And then it emerged, after I finished the book, that there was a character who had spent the last three years of Updike’s life sifting through the author’s trash, creeping up to the bottom of Updike’s driveway and hauling off garbage bags so he could hunt at his leisure for collectible memorabilia—anything with Updike’s handwriting on it, from discarded drafts to cancelled cheques. This revelation sickened me, in part because I could see, obscurely, a parallel with what I’d done.

“Tasteful biographers sift through archives, not trash cans. But what they look for is biographical gold (very valuable dirt), and that nearly always involves something written for private purposes: unpublished letters, say, or a diary no one knew about. Is unearthing this treasure very different from going through the garbage? I used to be sure, now I’m not.”

“Dirt for art’s sake: what’s offensive and what’s essential in author biographies?”

In “The Books That Built Me, by Justin Cartwright” published October 5, 2015 in the Sunday Times, the author—a writer himself and a judge for the Canadian Giller Prize last year—writes,

“If had to pick out one writer who influenced me most when I started, it would be Saul Bellow. What attracted me was his apparently effortless ability to deal with both the comedy of human life and the serious and intellectual. I found it intoxicating and have – in my own way – tried to do the same thing. There are descriptions in Saul Bellow’s books which are astonishing, and his description of the human face are absolutely brilliant. Very difficult to do with any originality. This too I have tried to emulate.”

He adds,

“I also loved the Rabbit books by John Updike, whom I knew quite well. The best of these is Rabbit at Rest, intensely moving as Rabbit heads for oblivion. I have written many times of Updike’s realism, his understanding of America and its people with all their idealism and longing, and I think that the Rabbit series are among the finest novels of the last quarter of the 20th century. He is certainly the finest chronicler of the ordinary life of the US in my lifetime.”

Cartwright’s latest book is Up Against the Night. 

Ever since Nicholson Baker lionized John Updike in an admirer’s confession titled U and I: A True Story, the anecdotes from Updike readers and fans have kept coming. The latest to surface is a reminiscence about one particular American Booksellers Association Convention, three speakers (Geraldine Ferraro, Richard Ford, John Updike), and one joke . . . with Updike as the punch line.

Here is Corey Mesler‘s mini-essay, “The Updike Joke and After,” which was published today on the Change Seven Magazine website.

The New Yorker & Me blog featured a post on September 11, 2015 titled “In Praise of John Updike’s Criticism (Contra James Wood).” The blogger takes exception with Woods’ assessment of Updike’s criticism, which surfaces in a Slate interview (18 August 2015) with Isaac Chotiner.

Chotiner complains, “I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about,” and Wood piles on:

“The maddening equilibrium of [Updike’s] critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything would be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put on the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself.”

This blogger responds, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.”

As “an offset against Wood’s sour remarks” the blogger quotes a passage from an Orhan Pamuk review of Adam Begley’s recent biography and also cites a dozen favorite and memorable passages from Updike’s criticism to prove that Updike’s reviews, like his fiction and poetry, was full of insights, as well as his omnipresent appreciation for language itself. Photo credit: Tom Bachtell.

In an article titled “Exclusive: Emily Ratajkowski on John Updike, Acting and Getting Naked,” writer Aaron Gell profiled the “Blurred Lines,” We Are Your Friends and Gone Girl star and had this exchange:

Ratajkowski: “And there’s a John Updike story I always love that my mom gave to me when I was 13 that’s about the daughter of this guy, and her female friend comes over and is wearing a tank top or something sexual, and the father makes her leave. It’s about the guilt and the shame that she feels for something she doesn’t understand. And to me, that’s always been so huge, because so much of our culture is about how women are supposed to behave in men’s eyes, and it’s never just a celebration of who they are. Like, what a wonderful thing to be a beautiful, sexual woman. How terrible that young women in our culture have to look towards pornography or over-sexualized versions of themselves to understand how to embrace their beauty. So, that’s sort of where I come from, and that’s definitely something my mom instilled in me.

Gell: “Updike hasn’t always been considered much of a feminist, so maybe that will change now.”

Ratajkowski:  “It might…”

Read the full article; photo by Getty Images via Maxim.