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Reading "Updike," I went in with a bias. As soon I realized that Adam Begley would likely agree with me about Updike’s skills and talents, I found myself in pure savor mode.
Updike fans will enjoy this biography. Guaranteed. Non-believers? Prepare for conversion. Begley’s fine portrait helps us see the combination of family forces and innate personality traits that produced one of the finest writers of the 20th Century. Updike is entertaining and deliciously detailed. And, most of all, reading Updike gives us the chance to watch an artist develop and get to work.
Quite literally, work.
John Updike made a commitment as a young teenager and never altered his course. The youthful glint in his eye never faded. He wrote a poem about four weeks before his death. With a main character who is intellectually playful and a biographer who so copiously examined the connection between Updike’s life and the many ways he fictionalized that life in the written word, there’s a powerful or interesting idea on each page of this beautifully written book, either from Updike himself or Begley teasing something out.
Perhaps the single most important ingredient in the formative stages of Updike’s career was a mother determined to imprint an only son with ambition and expectations as a writer. But Updike makes it clear that the writer took his mother’s ambition (“enough for two,” Begley writes) and applied himself like a voracious, insatiable student.
Begley’s close readings of Updike’s short stories and novels (and poetry) provide terrific insights into the life of the man himself. Updike, after all, digested his life for the sake of his art.Read more ›
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from a biography of an author as prolific in his fiction, essays, and shared personal experiences as john updike, all i expect is tidiness, someone to put stuff in order, which is work enough, which particularly becomes a tall order for any biographer faced with the embarrassing complications of updike's avowed adultery in disjunctive harmony with the adultery of his first wife. problematical about updike's adultery was his boyish attitude, his need to brag to us. yea, adulterers will always be with us. but even the most audacious husband, the uber-philanderer, the married sex addict with extra-marital statistics surpassing don giovanni, john kennedy, and warren beatty, let rumor and innuendo of reputation speak for them. no one has published accounts of deeds still warm from the bed sheets like john updike. such is the work of one writer of fiction.
begley devotes two hundred pages to the adultery in updike's books as paralleling the adulteries in updike's life, up until his second marriage. from there, in his later years, we see a wealthy, successful, happy, john updike, world traveler, book reviewer, essayist, writer of ephemera, the boy from small town pennsylvania made good.
who was this boy--hawk beak nose, silver scaled face from psoriasis, asthmatic, gangly, and clownish? what an ugly boy, and yet his mother convinced him he was special, no school yard humiliation for him, no reported taunts and insincerities. for an epigraph to his first chapter, begley quotes freud: A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.' even before john was born, his mother knew that if she married wesley updike son she bore would be a kind of a messiah. and she convinced her son john that he was special.Read more ›
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In this absorbing biography by Adam Begley - for whom, when Begley was a toddler, John Updike once juggled oranges - Begley returns the favor and juggles the many strands of Updike's life, and crafts a tale out of it. Begley has apparently read everything which Updike wrote, and describes the virtues of Updike's writing as a combination of "keen observation, stylistic brilliance and painful emotional honesty."
In reading Updike's novel CENTAUR for a fiction writing-literature class at NYU, I came upon a sentence so beautiful I had to mentally step back. At the next class, another student commented on the particular perfection of a sentence in the novel. Other students agreed it had struck them, too. It was the same sentence. In reading the first novel of Updike's Rabbit series, I felt compelled to type a list of the descriptions Updike used. They were poetry and art in one. In this biography, we read that Updike studied art at Oxford, after Harvard, and wrote verse for the NEW YORKER. Poetry and art leavened his fiction. Critic Whitney Balliett describes Updike's style in which a "poet's care and sensitivity lie lightly on every word on each hand-turned sentence, in each surprising and exact metaphor and simile".
How did Updike become a virtuoso? What was the nature of his virtuosity? What was he like as a man, husband, father and friend?
This book provides the answers to those questions. So, what IS unique about Updike and his work? As he comes across in this biography, Updike is endlessly quotable. He had a facility with words. He possibly could write more quickly than he could read, Begley suggests. As an only child, he found comfort in belonging as an adult - to a congregation, a poker club or a golf group.Read more ›
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