Updike

February 17, 2014
This deferential but insightful biography takes its place among the go-to sources on the life of the Pennsylvania-born “poet laureate of American middleness,” who died in 2009. 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 to chart his early influences—in particular his ambitious mother, Linda—and rigorously explore the heavily autobiographical dimensions of his fiction and poetry. A homeward-looking yearning and an unswerving ambition run throughout Updike’s life and career. In addition to his own astute observations, 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. Begley devotes hefty chapters to Updike’s long relationship with the New Yorker, as well as the fame-making, family-growing Ipswich years from whence came Rabbit, Run. The book limns the conflicted emotional makeup beneath its subject’s polished public persona, detailing his tenuous relationship with the WASP establishment, his restless sexual infidelities, and his alienation from 1960s counterculture. At the same time, Updike is revealed to have no great interior tumult on a par with that of his troubled alter ego, Harry Angstrom. Indeed, readers will see in Begley’s Updike an exceptionally gifted, but in many ways mainstream, American man. 16-page b&w photo insert. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

March 15, 2014

For this first biography of John Updike (1932-2009), Begley (editor, New York Observer) interviewed the author's friends and acquaintances, scoured library archives for correspondence, and assimilated much of the critical reception of the writer's fiction. He corroborates Updike's autobiographical admission that his destiny was shaped both by his strong-willed mother, who projected her literary aspirations onto her son, and by his birthplace, Shillington, PA, the archetype of the middle-class towns of his short stories and novels (The Centaur; Couples; the Rabbit tetralogy.) In a close reading of Updike's work, Begley fracts the dense shale of his subject's novels, short stories, and poems, extracting autobiographical substance, and melds it into an absorbing narrative. He plots Updike's literary trajectory from contributing editor of the Harvard Lampoon to his abiding association with The New Yorker through to the succession of novels that earned him accolades, prestige, and financial security. Updike's two marriages, his serial adultery, and his relationship with his children are delineated with cautious compliance to interviewed sources. Nevertheless, we discern that Updike's affable, congenial public persona belied an insecure, slyly derisive, and, as his last will discloses, mean-spirited individual. VERDICT Essential for Updike enthusiasts.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

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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. Former New York Observer books editor Begley (Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present, 2009, etc.) erects his formidable edifice on a sturdy foundation of research and convention. He interviewed the relevant relatives and friends, trod the ground in Pennsylvania (Updike's state of birth and youth), Massachusetts and elsewhere, and read all the works of Updike's most prolific career. Begley begins in Berks County, Pa., and shows us Updike's town-and-country boyhood, a time filled with reading and drawing and observing. His father was a public school teacher (see Updike's The Centaur); his mother, a homemaker and writer (she published in the New Yorker--like her son and grandson--and wrote novels). We see Updike's stellar schoolboy academic record and his matriculation at Harvard, where he earned a spot on the Harvard Lampoon staff and where he displayed the astonishing work ethic, creativity and precocity that would--while still in his 20s--earn him a staff position on the New Yorker and a lifelong publishing relationship with Alfred A. Knopf. Begley also shows us how Updike repeatedly mined his own experiences, populating his fiction with people like those in his own social circle (including his wives and many lovers). Perhaps too frequently, the author summarizes and explicates numerous of his works (including Updike's poems and essays) and throughout displays a patent admiration, even affection, for his subject. He suggests that Updike's conservative social positions (on civil rights, on Vietnam) were sometimes born of a desire to be contrarian rather than of actual conviction. Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike's blood.

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March 15, 2014
A keen appreciation for literary criticism is a prerequisite for reader interest in this thoroughly researched and rigorously presented biography of one of the most honored and respected American writers of the twentieth century. Updike was the last of the Renaissance men, at home in all fields of writing. His novels and short stories dominate his canon, but poetry and literary and art criticism did not take backseats in terms of the intelligence and writerly skills he brought to such endeavors. Updike certainly was multidimensional, and his long life and distinguished career attest to an unwavering focus on achieving distinctiveness in his writing. To that end, he gathered as fodder the details of the environs in which he lived, namely Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and all the subtleties of personality he could discern in the people who inhabited those locales with him, even close family members. It is Begley's primary goal to stitch Updike's writing to the realities of his existence. He does so meaningfully but too often intrusively, at the expense of a smoothly flowing pursuit of the events in Updike's life. Nevertheless, this is an important view of a giant literary figure. High-Demand Backstory: A national media, radio, and print campaign and a social-networking campaign on Goodreads will be part of the publicity campaign to promote this major biography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)