John Updike, Now and Then

With the passing of John Updike in 2009, the scholarly work of assessing his life’s achievement has begun in earnest. For anyone familiar with the scholarly reception of Updike, this might seem like a strange claim, since critics and academics have been attempting to summarize and categorize his work since the late 1980s. Updike has been a notoriously uncooperative subject of study, however, mainly because he continued to write at his habitually breathless pace almost up to the end of his life. This extraordinary output seemed to hold open the possibility that he would develop in new stylistic and thematic directions (as some scholars have in fact argued). At the same time, this sense of development and experimentation in Updike’s work is counterbalanced by his remarkable consistency, a reverberation of voice and thematic concern that make his oeuvre unmistakable and unique in twentieth-century American literature. These countervailing effects have generated starkly inconsistent evaluations of Updike’s career and a continuing pressure, perhaps stronger now than ever, to make creditable definitive claims about his place in literary history.

The works I examine in this review, John Updike’s Early Years, Becoming John Updike, and John Updike: A Critical Biography, share a commitment to solidifying their author’s reputation and developing a synoptic vision of his career. While they take different approaches to this project, each of these studies struggles with what is perhaps the central difficulty of coming to terms with Updike: on the one hand, the writerly talent and sheer output of Updike’s work would appear to warrant strong claims about the universality and enduring validity of Updike studies; on the other hand, Updike has just as often been accused of sacrificing content for stylistic brio and emphasizing commercial success above other considerations. The popular success of Updike’s books has not always translated into prestige in the scholarly world or a general consensus among critics and reviewers about his merits. Whether this reflects more on Updike’s work or the academy’s assumptions still remains to be seen, but it is clear that today there is a renewed interest in the question of his literary legacy. Coming at the end of Updike’s life, the three studies I look at here struggle with the paradoxical features of Updike studies and, while it is not clear that they are ultimately able to reconcile the tensions that have stubbornly persisted in the evaluation of Updike’s life and work, they are important indications of the continuing promise of the field.

John Updike’s Early Years opens with a frank meditation on the future of Updike studies. The book’s central claim is that understanding Updike’s childhood background will help the reader to evaluate Updike’s importance as a mature writer. In an otherwise well-structured and interesting book, the connection between these two themes remains tenuous throughout this slim volume, however, and many of the most suggestive aspects of his early life are hinted at rather than fully explored. The author, Jack De Bellis, moves uncomfortably between psychology, archival history, and reportage, with the result that none of these approaches develops into a consistent interpretation of Updike’s early life. Updike’s childhood experience with psoriasis, his stutter, and his awkward appearance, for example, are introduced as psychological themes, but we only read the reported history of overcoming these difficulties. In these and similar examples, the book is plagued by the continuing mystique of Updike’s success—that unshakable image of the wunderkind out of rural Pennsylvania who sprang fully formed onto the pages of the New Yorker. What is missing in this account is the depth that comes from a backstory. During his life, Updike was able to purvey an image of himself that was so blithe and natural as to seem almost naively two-dimensional. This ghost of happy...