Category Archives: Reviews

Daily Beast picks Updike as a Best Biography

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In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”

Of Updike, they wrote:

“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”

Telegraph names Begley bio a best book of 2014

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The Telegraph has come up with a list of “The best books of 2014—The must-read novels, memoirs and history books released in 2014 so far.” In the category of biography, Adam Begley’s Updike made the cut with a five-star (out of five) rating, flanked by biographies on Updike’s literary frenemy Philip Roth, T.E. Lawrence, British politician Roy Kenkins, and Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor.

“Begley’s biography shows just how closely and relentlessly Updike mined his own life for fiction,” the editors write.

Dybek reviewer cites Updike as a major influence

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paperlanternCharles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:

“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.

ecstaticcahoots“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’

“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”

But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.

Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.

 

Early review appears of the UK version of Begley’s bio

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It’s not on the Internet, but thanks to David Lull we have a transcript of an early review of the UK version of Adam Begley’s Updike:

“Beautiful dreamer.” Jenny Needham. Northern Echo [Darlington (UK)]. May 5, 2014. 42.
Adam Begley provides the ideal companion to the life of writer John Updike
Non-fiction Updike by Adam Begley (Harper [pounds]25, eBook [pounds]25)

“For the second half of the 20th Century, John Updike bestrode the world of US fiction as the definitive man of letters. His best novels—notably the Rabbit tetralogy—invited comparison with the greats of the 19th Century.

“Effortlessly prolific, absurdly versatile and almost invariably wordperfect, his output included more than a dozen novels, around 100 short stories (many lodged with the New Yorker, his spiritual home), several hundred book reviews (ditto), collections of light verse, and writings on golf, art and all sorts of miscellaneous topics.

“He was the sort of writer who could turn even a frivolous magazine commission into a text of lasting beauty. Yet for all the prizes and adulation, he originally hoped to make it as an illustrator, and secretly wished that people took his serious poetry more seriously.

“In Adam Begley, Updike has a biographer worthy of his talents. A fine writer in his own right, Begley is empathetic but not uncritical, and organises his story thematically—golf, infidelities, travels abroad etc—rather than follow a strict chronology.

“Begley is a close reader of the texts, adept at teasing out both pointed literary insights and the biographical parallels between the life and the fiction. These, it turns out, are almost embarrassingly easy to find: adultery in the suburbs, the death of parents, the character of his children, the travails of being a grandparent. . . Updike ruthlessly pillages his and his loved ones’ personal lives for material.

“For me, the first two-thirds of the book could not have been bettered.

“But the final sections, detailing Updike’s late writings and death, have a disappointingly foreshortened feel.

“All in all, though, if you love Updike you’ll absolutely love this book.”

Note: To read the online reviews of Updike collected thus far (which now number 59), click here.

John Updike, Chronicler: a review of a review

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Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 7.41.27 PMEverything That Rises, out of Georgetown University, published a think piece by Paul Elie that’s a review of (or at least reaction to) writer Orhan Pamuk’s review of Adam Begley’s biography, Updike.

In “John Updike, Chronicler,” Elie notes that Pamuk “all but came out and said the thinkable-unsayable—that Updike was more vital as an essayist than as a novelist” and wonders,

“So why isn’t Updike appreciated as an essayist? Possibly because just as there is no single essential Updike novel, there is no single essential Updike essay (the one about Ted Williams’ last game comes closest). . . . That Updike was a chronicler is true of his essays, too. He chronicled his own life: his coming of age, and his aging. He chronicled the art world through several decades of museum and gallery show reviews. And he chronicled postwar fiction from Nabokov to Pamuk himself in several hundred book reviews. He even chronicled the waxing and waning (mainly the waning) of religious feeling and current trends in Christian theology. The essays, beautifully turned in themselves, were never meant to stand along (though many do). They are set at a very wide angle to their time and place—the angle formed by the pages of an opened New Yorker.”

Ozick: Kafka did not transcend his Jewishness, no matter what Updike claimed

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In a review of Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach (Princeton University Press), writer Cynthia Ozick took exception with Updike’s remarks made in the introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories:

Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 8.16.05 AM“In an otherwise seamless introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories, John Updike takes up the theme of transcendence with particular bluntness: ‘Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.’ As evidence, he notes that the Samsas in ‘The Metamorphosis’ make the sign of the cross. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche. . . . The idea of the parochial compels its opposite: what is not parochial must be universal. And if the parochial is deemed a low distraction from the preponderant social force—’that is to say, predominantly Christian’—then what is at work is no more than supercilious triumphalism. To belittle as parochial the cultural surround (‘the ethnic source’) that bred Kafka is to diminish and disfigure the man—to do to him what so many of Kafka’s stories do to their hapless protagonists.”

Here’s the full review, which appeared in the April 11, 2014 Books section of the New Republic:  “How Kafka Actually Lived; He did not transcend his Jewishness, no matter what Updike claimed.”

Higgins on Begley’s case for rereading Updike

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Jim Higgins, who may be familiar to readers as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel journalist who has been reading an Updike short story weekly and posting his considerations, has been thinking about Updike again—this time in the context of the forthcoming Adam Begley biography, Updike, which will finally be available to the general public next week.

“Adam Begley’s bio makes strong case for rereading ‘Updike'”

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New York Observer writer considers the case for Updike as a major artist

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Even before it falls into the hands of average readers on April 8,  Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, is doing what scholars and society members expected: reawakening the debate over Updike’s status as an American writer.

There has always been a small segment who think he “writes like an angel but has nothing to say,” and reports of his demotion in the canon have been greatly exaggerated, given his continued presence in major anthologies. Michael H. Miller of the New York Observer weighs in, but only concludes “Updike, like George Caldwell in The Centaur, a character modeled after his own father, did the best he could with what was given to him—a massive flawed talent. Here’s the whole article:

“Literary Genius or Horny Diletantte? Adam Begley’s Bio Makes the Case for John Updike as a Major Artist”

De Bellis: Updike’s first biographer gets a gold medal

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9780061896453.jpg“Updike’s First Biographer Gets a Gold Medal”
By Jack De Bellis
February 20, 2014

Rev. of Adam Begley’s Updike. [New York]: HarperCollins, [2014].     

John Updike famously wrote his memoir Self-Consciousness to discourage potential biographers while he lived. Now, five years after Updike’s death, Adam Begley, whose father was Updike’s Harvard classmate, has given us a comprehensive, perceptive, handsomely written critical biography. Updike owes its success to Begley’s studious use of the Houghton Library’s trove of Updike material, his tireless leg-work in interviewing relatives, friends, lovers, and writers, and his judicious evaluation of Updike’s oeuvre. Begley authoritatively dates Updike’s canon and precisely charts his timeline. For instance, though Marry Me was published in 1976, Begley shows it was written in 1964, and while Updike divorced in 1976, Begley reveals that he nearly left his family in 1962.

Begley’s exactitude is formidable: Shillington’s parking meters first appeared in 1940; Updike made $1,003 from The New Yorker in 1954; Joyce Harrington was the married woman for whom he nearly divorced in 1962; Madeline and Medea were the names of Miranda Updike’s two sheep; and Rosette was the Updikes’ Antibes babysitter. But does the reader need to know that an Updike Ipswich home had been owned in the thirties by George Brewer Jr. “who co-wrote Dark Victory,” later a Bette Davis film? Well, after such scholarly excavation, Begley can be forgiven his passion for detail.

So Begley is factually trustworthy, and so are his informed readings of Updike’s work—and his observations of Updike the man, as his “Introduction” discloses. In 1993 he witnessed Updike’s encounter with a meddlesome woman, and Begley cleverly perceived Updike’s spectrum of responses as he reacted. Right away we know we are in the hands of writer with sharp eyes and a shrewd mind. Updike will grab casual readers and be indispensable to specialists.   Continue reading →

UPDIKE, by Adam Begley: reviews

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9780061896453.jpgThe reviews have started coming in for Adam Begley’s much-anticipated biography of John Updike, titled, simply, Updike. The 576-page book will be published by HarperCollins on April 1, 2014. More reviews will be added as we become aware of them, organized by publication date, so check back.

“UPDIKE by Adam Begley.” Kirkus Reviews. January 20, 2014 (print version February 1, 2014). “A sympathetic, full-meal-deal biography—life, literary works, reputation—of John Updike (1932-2009), who was considered by many to be the most talented of his generation. . . . Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike’s blood.”

“Updike.” Goodreads. January 30, 2014. “With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from “Pigeon Feathers” to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.”

“Begley: UPDIKE; Random Notes on Adam Begley’s UPDIKE, Part 1.” Peter Quinones. Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse. February 5, 2014. “Begley devotes one paragraph to the only major Hollywood studio release based on Updike’s fiction, The Witches of Eastwick. What?! No juicy tale of ‘Updike in Hollywood’? He mentions Updike and his wife got to see the picture by sneaking into an afternoon showing at the mall . . . again, what?! What’s the story behind that?”

“Updike.” Publishers Weekly. February 17, 2014. “Without always matching the laborious detail of Jack De Bellis’s John Updike’s Early Years (2013), this comprehensive account from literary critic Begley draws on deep research and interviews with the author and his circle . . . . Begley (whose father was a Harvard classmate of Updike’s) marshals revealing commentary by Updike’s contemporaries, like college roommate and future historian Christopher Lasch, who discuss the hesitations and insecurities hounding him.”

“De Bellis: Updike’s first biographer gets a gold medal.” Jack De Bellis. The John Updike Society. February 20, 2014. “Updike owes its success to Begley’s studious use of the Houghton Library’s trove of Updike material, his tireless leg-work in interviewing relatives, friends, lovers, and writers, and his judicious evaluation of Updike’s oeuvre.”

Continue reading →