“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 →

The 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.”

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And we start the new year with an interesting post:  a book critic (Leo Robson, The Guardian) reviewing a book critic (Craig Raine, and also James Walcott) who’s reviewing Updike’s book and art criticism, among other things.

In “More Dynamite: Essays 1990-2012 by Craig Raine—review,” posted on The Guardian online on Friday, December 27, 2013, Robson notes of both the main title reviewed and Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs that “the only writer given extensive treatment in both these books is Updike.

“Wolcott praises the ‘deft, polite scalpeling’ Updike performs on Saul Bellow (he peels away the ‘rugged prettiness’ to locate an ‘agitated sluggishness’), and his capacity to ‘dig beneath the hype and confetti of a book’s reception’ (in this case, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). But he also notes a ‘lack of heat and force,’ exactly the qualities Wolcott himself aims for and attains, and calls for more ‘plainspokenness, even a whiff of woodsmoke from the old slash-and-burn,’ just as Raine, writing about Updike’s essay on Andrew Wyeth, complains that at a certain point he ‘caves in,’ and dismisses as ‘ludicrously indulgent’ Updike’s comparison of Fairfield Porter to Matisse and Piero della Francesca.

“Updike stands as an object of worship to both Raine and Wolcott, a model of what can be done, except on those occasions when magnanimity limits honesty—cardinal virtue of any critic.”

Reviews and responses to the Library of America publication of John Updike: The Collected Stories are starting to appear. We’ll add to this list as entries become known to us.

“Tag Archives: John Updike: The Collected Stories.” Andrew Keyser. Portland (Oregon) Book Review. September 10, 2013. “Updike is one of those rare authors that appeals to a diverse group of people. Lovers of American [sic] will fit right into these stories, recognizing the daily joys and struggles of small-town America. Philosophers will find wisdom in over forty years of storytelling, and those that just want a good story will have no trouble finding many in these nearly two thousand pages.”

“My Hitherto Inadequately Superficial World; Reading John Updike’s stories.” Scott Dill. Books & Culture (Christianity Today). October 2013. “For one who comes to Updike looking for an existential defense of Christianity, as I did when I first read him, these stories may surprise in their essential playfulness.”

“John Updike: The Collected Stories.” Trevor. The Mookse and the Gripes. October 3, 2013. “Trevor” begins with a disclaimer—”I simply haven’t read them all or nearly enough to write a proper ‘review'”—but adds, “Still, I heartily recommend this collection. I want interested readers to know about this set, a set filled with notes and other supplemental material to really dive deeply into Updike’s extensive work across more than half a century.”

“Reading the John Updike stories: ‘Dentistry and Doubt.'” Jim Higgins. JSOnline (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). October 16, 2013. In this blog entry Higgins notes that “‘Dentistry and Doubt’ is the first story in this collection to remind us that Updike is not only a chronicler of lust, but one of Christian faith and doubt as well.”

“Teller of Tales; The Definitive Updike, in two volumes.” William H. Pritchard. The Weekly Standard Book Review (Washington, D.C.). Vol. 19:7. October 21, 2013. Pritchard writes, “Since his death, my impression is that his reputation has slipped a bit, as if reading fiction about discontent, sorrow, and fear is not to play for high enough stakes.”

“The Curious Paradox of John Updike.” James Santel. The Millions. October 24, 2013. Santel writes that “almost five years after his death, Updike’s critics often seem to outweigh his admirers” and says, “Having read nearly 200 of Updike’s stories in rapid succession, I’m more sympathetic to the critics’ point of view than I had been. While not willing to go as far as Franzen, who argues that Updike was ‘wasting’ his ‘tremendous, Nabokov-level talent,’ I was surprised by how many of Updike’s stories impressed me while I read them, and how few left an impression. . . . The curious paradox of Updike is that he made art into a craft, but only rarely did he transcend craft to achieve art.”

“John Updike Gives the Mundane Its Beautiful Due.” Jeff Tompkins. PopMatters. November 14, 2013. “Any collection of 186 stories by the same author is bound to have its share of duds. Updike was such a pro that even his minor efforts maintain the same meticulous finish; the misfires usually result from his experimenting with form or subject matter, and offer the inherent interest of a major talent testing its boundaries.”

March 31, 2009 was the publication date for Endpoint, Updike’s final collection of poems. These are the reviews of which we’re aware.

“Endpoint and Other Poems.” Publishers Weekly. March 30, 2009. “Many delights but few real surprises await Updike’s admirers in this last book of poems from the prolific essayist and novelist, completed only weeks before his death.”

“The New Yorker: ‘Endpoint’—Poems by John Updike.” Cliff Garstang. Perpetual Folly. March 18, 2009. “The speed with which this book is being produced no doubt makes good business sense, but seems grisly to me, particularly if the excerpt in TNY is an indication of the overall subject matter.”

“‘Endpoint and Other Poems’ by John Updike.” Carmela Ciuraru. March 31, 2009. “These last poems are tender, nostalgic but never sentimental.”

“Endpoint and Other Poems.” Ray Olson. Booklist Online. April 1, 2009. Olson writes that “these are personal but not egotistic poems. It seems as though Updike were aiming to record the end of the life of a successful enough American middle-class male, and in his novelist’s voice.”

“Updike’s ENDPOINT: Light at Sunset.” W. Scott Smoot. The Word Sanctuary. April 11, 2009. “In his writing, Updike never shied from the darkest and foulest parts (however often I wished he had), but he always highlighted ‘whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is just’ in the subject at hand,” Smoot writes. “Nine years after AMERICANA, he turns that same light on his own aging and death in ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS.”

“’Endpoint: And Other Poems,’ by John Updike.” Nicholas Delbanco. San Francisco Chronicle. April 12, 2009. “. . . it’s doubly a shock and revelation when the palate darkens and the poetry goes deep. The titular series, ‘Endpoint,’ seems to this reader an act of sustained self-examination, and very brave.”

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