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Updike, by Adam Begley
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Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
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.
- Sales Rank: #435745 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-04-08
- Released on: 2014-04-08
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2014: Especially with fiction, It’s often useful to separate artists from their art, to assume that a novel, or an entire body of work, isn’t thinly veiled autobiography. Updike, Adam Begley’s exhaustive and revealing account of the American master’s life, begs us to reconsider that doctrine. Detailed yet readable, it goes far beyond describing the chronology of this unsurprisingly complex (and often paradoxical) character, layering on the lit crit where John Updike’s real life bled into his novels. Essential for admirers and illuminating for anyone with an interest in literature, Updike already merits consideration as one of the best biographies of 2014. --Jon Foro
From Booklist
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. --Brad Hooper
Review
''A brilliant biography. . . . A delightfully rich book. . . . Highly readable. . . . The joys of Updike are based on discovering the autobiographical content of the tens of thousands of details that populate Updike's vast fictional universe.'' (Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times Book Review)
''A superb achievement. . . . A book that, in its evocation of a brilliant but flawed personality, conjured via the skillful deployment of just-so details and a subtle hint of haunting existential grace, is in some ways as rewarding as Updike's best fiction.'' (Scott Stossel, The Boston Globe)
''A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer.'' (Joyce Carol Oates)
''Adam Begley's Updike is a model of what a literary biography should be: rich with penetrating insights not only about the life but also about the work. It will enthrall long-time Updike fans and help create generations of new ones.'' (Francine Prose)
''Adam Begley's brilliant evocation of our own literary giant should be required reading for Americans; Updike illumines a particular era with John Updike's own ferocity and tenderness.'' (Jayne Anne Phillips)
''Adam Begley's careful and considerate biography illuminates all the right things about Updike, whose dramas were lived both privately and publicly. It's a social history in which one man's heart, mind, and talent came to resonate for an entire society.'' (Ann Beattie)
'''You have to give it magic,' John Updike explained of the stuff on the page; Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux.'' (Stacy Schiff)
''Adam Begley tells the story of John Updike's life in art with brilliant tautness, as if he were writing a novel. He has rendered a portrait of the writer that shimmers with truth. This is literary biography at its highest level of excellence.'' (Janet Malcolm)
''On the evidence of this judicious new biography, John Updike recorded in his fiction the most painful events in his life. . . . Begley demonstrates that Updike was more complicated than the twinkly public persona he created for himself.'' (Robert Wilson, The American Scholar)
''Begley seamlessly weaves biography and critical analysis throughout his book, much as Updike himself blurred autobiography and fiction. Updike is a monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'' (The New York Observer)
''As a biographer, Begley has a great many strengths -- concision, eloquence, an eagle eye -- and few of the usual shortcomings.'' (The Wall Street Journal)
''Not only has Begley written a convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout, he has also produced a major work of Updike criticism. . . . Displaying total command of his material, Begley does his author proud.'' (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)
''Honorable. . . . Updike's exquisite words flowed, some felt, too freely and too amiably. . . . It's one of the achievements of Begley's book that it so acutely demonstrates how it all, in fact, didn't come so easily. . . . Begley is a gifted literary critic.'' --(Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
''The two-time Pulitzer winner couldn't have hoped for a biography more respectful -- or more critically attuned to his work than this one. Updike is gracefully written. . . . It contains revealing tales about Updike's work habits and publishing relationships that haven't been told before.'' (The San Francisco Chronicle)
''An exemplary biography, oceanically researched, full of insights. . . . Begley is even-handed in his judgments and is a fine writer himself, his supple and cadenced prose sometimes matching his subject's.'' (The Sunday Times (London))
''An insightful, compelling, discreet, and admirable biography. . . . In synthesizing a substantial amount of material through clear, intelligent prose, Begley does what I never thought possible: he writes a biography I wished were longer.'' (The Christian Science Monitor)
''This is a generous tribute to an amusing and brilliant man. . . . Begley is a perceptive reader, illuminating the different alter egos who populate Updike s fiction.'' (The Financial Times)
''Though Adam Begley s biography is the first on the writer, it's hard to see how it will be bettered. Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy, and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography. . . . A complex, intimate portrait.'' (Dan Cryer, Newsday)
''Adam Begley has written an exemplary biography. . . . Respectful and sympathetic. . . . Any Updike fan will find it rewarding, as indeed will anyone who has enjoyed his work and any reader with an interest in modern American letters.'' (The Guardian)
''Begley is so much in command of his subject. . . . He has located the man behind the giant oeuvre.'' (Sam Tanenhaus, Prospect)
''A master storyteller comes to affably charming life in Begley's incisive biography. . . . Begley finds the truest reflection of the man in his work.'' (Vogue)
''Fabulous. . . . Updike fans will enjoy Begley's marvelous biography, which is as much about the man as the writer.'' (Entertainment Weekly)
''Terrific. . . . Begley's book blends biography with a brilliant close read of Updike's work. . . . As insightful on the work as the life, it is a complicated and fascinating portrait of one of the great literary lives of the second half of the 20th century.'' (Salon)
''A hefty, thorough biography. . . . Begley does an impressive, conscientious job of marshaling evidence of Updike's many contradictions.'' (Jonathan Dee, Harper's)
''An insightful and meticulously researched book. . . . A sustained, very fine work of literary criticism.'' (The New Republic)
''A highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being.'' (Louis Menand, The New Yorker)
''Begley is quiet, careful, self-effacing, and steady. . . . He amply shows us the strangeness and contradictions under the affable mask.'' (Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books)
''A sympathetic and thorough biography. . . . The more I read about Updike, the more I wanted to go back and read Updike.'' --(USA Today)
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
A Life-Long Ethnography of Himself
By not a natural
For those of us who do not read a lot of fiction and have little knowledge of the world of contemporary literature, Adam Begley's biography Updike is more accessible and interesting than one might expect. Even though Updike's work includes literally hundreds of titles -- novels, short stories, poems, exercises in criticism, edited collections, obituaries, tributes, and works that defy conventional categorization -- Begley provides the kind and level of coherence that even we relatively untutored readers can follow. In view of the sheer volume of Updike's prose and poetry, Begley's ability to loosely but interpretably tie things together thematically and stylistically is very helpful, providing encouragement and generating interest in reading Updike's work, whether systematically or in a catch-as-catch-can manner.
Following Begley, Updike's writing, with occasional exceptions, might usefully be characterized as a long-term ethnography of himself. Whatever he was doing, from having sex to planting a vegetable garden to putting up storm windows, Updike maintained an essential detachment, enabling him to observe himself and how he felt even when fully engaged in the activity at hand. Whether his tasks were exotic, mundane, dully commonplace, or fraught with a disparate multitude of other feeling and ideas, he retained his role as an observer.
This same capacity for non-stop observation and internal documentation enabled Updike to become keenly adept at describing his physical environment in remarkably fine detail. A cup and saucer, the leaf of a sugar maple in autumn, the unnerving grinding of gears that fail to mesh when a standard transmission is being used by a beginning driver -- an abundance of sights and sounds that provided a richly detailed context for whatever Updike was writing about. One might reasonably maintain that Updike lived so that he could write, never really unselfconscious, and always on the self-centered alert. Perhaps this is why he said that he sometimes couldn't disentangle what he had written from what he had actually lived.
That so much of his work is set in his hometown of Shillington and later in the farmhouse in Plowville, places where he lived out his boyhood and adolescence, reinforces the notion that his unfailing self-awareness was not something Updike deliberately sought to develop. Instead, it was an innate capability, something that was there from the beginning and that he never lost. He took it for granted as it helped make him the writer he wanted to be.
This sort of tightly focused self-awareness and attention to accurate rendering of everyday details is by no means an unmixed blessing, nor it is something that all writers want or admire. Critics sometimes found his work, the entire oeuvre as it existed at any time, entirely too autobiographical. When he married and moved to suburban Ipswitch, he inevitably took the self-aware, autobiographical approach with him. In the early '60's when he wrote Couples, another novel about ordinary people, self-centered and deeply immersed in the then startlingly lurid bed-hopping that constituted a substantial part of their everyday lives, he was still an ethnographer, a participant-observer, studying himself as closely as he studied his friends and neighbors.
Begley devotes an entire chapter to couples, writing for the most part about the short story that preceded the full-length novel. For one who read Couples at the time it was first published, it's a bit disconcerting to read about Tarbox (Ipswitch) and its obsessively adulterous sex without reference to the novel's protagonist and premier sexual athlete, Piet Hanema. Couples was a literary sensation whose influence spilled over into popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek. I recall reading a brief news-magazine interview with Updike in which he was asked the obvious: was his portrayal of the lasciviousness of his friends and neighbors an accurate rendering of life in Ipswitch. Coyly, he acknowledged that it was unlikely that thirty-something couples could be as actively and intensely engaged as the Ipswitch crowd without giving rise to something more intense than volleyball and touch football. According to Begley, however, this disingenuous response thoroughly understated Updike's real-life philandering as well as that of his wife and the rest of the Ipswitch group.
I think that Couples can reasonably be read as an explanation for the disaffection of youth that went beyond the civil rights and anti-war movements. The lives of upper middle class suburbanites may have been filled with sexual adventurism, but otherwise they seemed meaningless, as if the sex and incessant group socializing were part of a desperate effort to fill a purposeless void. Whether or not that is the case, this is another instance in which Updike used his powers of detached observation and interpretation to tell us still more about the lives of ordinary Americans, which I take to be the over-riding purpose of his work, prolific as he was.
I think Updike was keenly attuned to the idea that life in the U.S. was, for many ordinary citizens, an often fruitless and failed search for meaning and purpose, and this was manifest in Updike's own uncertain and uneasy adherence to an amorphous sort of Christian faith, as well as his intellectually unfashionable patriotism. My conjectures, however, are based on the little that I've read by Updike and on Begley's detailed biography. For readers whose knowledge of Updike's work is as limited as mine, Begley's book may best be construed as an invitation to read more of Updike. I'm going to start with the Rabbit tetralogy, and see if it, too, describes and unrelenting search for something solid and substantial to hold on to, maybe a Toyota dealership construed as something more.
61 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
This bio is filled with very interesting and informative information
By Israel Drazin
This is an easy to read, very detailed, sympathetic, and insightful biography of Updike’s life and an explanation of his writings. Begley drew upon extensive interviews, including talks with Updike’s mother, friends and acquaintances, and meticulous examinations of much archival material. Despite details, it is not at all ponderous. To the contrary, the book is interesting, enlightening, and enjoyable.
Begley tells about Updike’s early years in Berks County during the depression, how he wanted to be a cartoonist, how his mother was the strong figure in his family and overrode his wishes and those of his father. She was also a writer, although not successful. She was certain that her son would be a great writer and therefore took him, against his wishes, to a somewhat secluded farm. Begley describes Updike’s strange relationship with his parents and how he depicted them in his writings in a somewhat negative fashion, although his parents admitted that he described them correctly.
Begley tells about Updike’s escape from his parents as soon as he was able to drive, his life in Harvard, and his years at The New Yorker, which rejected many of his early writings, for writing for The New Yorker was his early life-time goal. He also tells about his foreign travels and his final home where he remained until he died in 2009.
Most interesting is Begley’s examination of Updike’s stories and his revelation that many incidences are based with very little disguise on Updike’s life, and on his description of Updike, revealing that he was not precisely what he appeared to be.
Readers will find much that will interest them in this bio and will learn much about this famous author.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
A GRACEFUL AND INSIGHTFUL BIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITER AS MEMORY ARTIST
By David Keymer
There are occasional passages (e.g., in the chapter “The Two Iseults”) that read like a fast-paced motor tour of Updike’s stories –hey! hop, skip, it’s time to move on to the next story-- but for the most part, Begley is a sympathetic reader who uses the blatantly autobiographical material of Updike’s corpus to dig into the writer’s complicated inner life and its connection with his fiction, poetry and prose. The book is peppered with sympathetic insights into Updike’s life and literary corpus and Begley, former book editor for the New York Observer (1996-2009) writes like a dream.
In a famous address, Updike once said that his fiction pledged allegiance “to the mild, middling truth of American life” but as a writer, he was seldom if ever middling. Dismissed by some critics as too much a miniaturist and memory artist, Updike yet managed to pull off one of the great literary coups of modern times with his magnificent Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. If he had written nothing else I suspect we’d be reading him for quite a long while but he was prolific writer (sixty-four published volumes in his lifetime!). It would be hard to better Begley’s biography of the artist. It is both graceful (grace-filled) and insightful.
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