Updike

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.