Sifting fact and fiction in Updike’s life and work

Updike by Adam Begley (HarperCollins, £25)

It could be argued — and there’s a point early on in this rich, judicious biography when the author raises the argument himself — that we hardly need a life of John Updike: the novelist has supplied us with all the details himself.

From an enormous output of novels, stories and poems, we can trace the small-town upbringing, the cosseted, solitary childhood, the burgeoning ambition, and the ease of that ambition’s consolidation; not to mention the fondness for basketball, golf and multiple adultery. All delivered, of course, with Updike’s gift for exquisitely meticulous observation, a style whose elegant turns of phrase shame others into incoherence, at even the most trivial level: who else could transmute the pleasure and experience of pinball, to take one example, into the two-word phrase “rockety-ding”? What could a mere biography deliver that could offer any meaningful competition to this?

Quite a bit, in this case, as it happens: and Adam Begley proves himself a very capable chronicler and sifter of Updike’s life, which was, more than almost any other 20th-century writer’s apart from Proust’s, the raw material for his work. (Nine-tenths of Updike’s fiction, you get the feeling after reading this, could, like this biography itself, have been called Updike.)

The impression is forced home, without forcing, from the anecdote Begley chooses to open his biography with: that of a freelance writer who decides to reconnoitre Updike’s home town, bumps into the author’s mother in a bookshop, and is then taken by her to meet her son.

An interview of middling awkwardness results, which the journalist duly writes up; only to find, some weeks later, the same events turned by Updike himself into a short story for the New Yorker, “One More Interview”. The interviewee is now an actor, not a writer, but otherwise the exchanges are transcribed verbatim. (Updike called the art of turning life into fiction “shapely lies”, but changing a writer to an actor doesn’t involve the most tortuous of shapings.)

Updike’s life is an unusually tricky one to describe, then, if you’re trying to come up with something new or, better, scandalously new, for just this reason; and then there is the other problem common to that of most writers’ lives: the largely solitary and uneventful nature of the work itself. And it is not as if Updike had an unusually eventful life, or a long, hard struggle to achieve eminence and success. Always at the top of his class, straight As in every subject, he had the example of a mother who was a writer (albeit mostly unsuccessful, until he could help the passage of her stories into the New Yorker) to encourage him; and the New Yorker, about whose influence and position at the time Begley writes perceptively, was both mother and child’s lodestar.

Honours at school came to him easily; his mother encouraged his desire for flight from his home town; Harvard nurtured his personality, even when each chafed against the other, and provided a straightforward launchpad to the magazine he worshipped. He wanted to be both respected and bought in large numbers, and his wish was granted.

Begley manages to make what could have been a dull story compelling. Alive to the question of whether Updike’s talent was glib or lacking depth, he’s sensitive to Updike’s writing, and there is none of that grotesque gap between style of biographer and style of biographee that can plague the form. A respectful distance, but there isn’t a clunky or stupid sentence in the book.

It all ends sadly, Updike’s reputation assailed as critics react against his substandard final works; the sales and the acclaim, those circles Updike squared for so long, both fade. But the case for his reputation here is both honestly and intelligently made.

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