Biography of John Updike a solid analysis of his work, life

John Updike, who died in 2009 at 76, was one of the best-known and most highly regarded American writers of the second half of the 20th century. He started publishing his work in The New Yorker as soon as he graduated from Harvard in 1954 and produced dozens of novels and collections of short stories and hundreds of shorter pieces.

In Updike, Adam Begley gives the writer the biography he deserves - a dexterous combination of literary analysis and life events.

Begley's task is made trickier by the fact that so much of Updike's work drew directly on his experiences, whether the years growing up in rural Pennsylvania or those spent wife-swapping in suburban Boston.

But Begley moves neatly between the works of fiction that Updike is writing at any given point in his life and those that describe the time remembered.

Adulteries aside, Updike didn't live a particularly eventful life. The "effortlessly industrious" and unremittingly ambitious author worked on fiction for three hours every morning and on other writing, or writing-related activities, in the afternoon. He traveled occasionally, to give speeches or receive awards, and played a lot of golf.

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His first wife, Mary, essentially raised their four children, who came in rapid succession after the couple married right out of college; his second wife, Martha, with whom he lived in a mansion on a hill, jealously guarded his privacy.

The biography doesn't trudge dutifully through every year or every work of writing. Begley pays particular attention to the novels he regards as most important, including the four-book Rabbit Angstrom series, which won Updike two Pulitzer Prizes; and the scandalous Couples, which broadened the author's audience out from his New Yorker base. He dismisses others, including several of Updike's later novels, in a sentence or two.

The biography offers glimpses of Updike's warm relationships with New Yorker editors Katharine White and William Maxwell, who aided his writing and his career, and his cooler one with longtime book editor Alfred Knopf, described by Updike as "a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate." And it delves into the professional rivalries between Updike and Philip Roth and John Cheever, whose journals and letters make it clear that Cheever thought of the younger Updike as something of a punk.

Updike, Begley argues, primarily "wanted to entertain, and he wanted to be loved - if possible, universally." Publicly, he was "playfully mischievous and dazzlingly clever," but there was "an undercurrent of aggression in all that expertly deployed charm, a razor edge to his ostensibly gentle wit."

Despite its length, the biography is graceful rather than ponderous, as much of a pleasure to read as Updike's prose.

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