Updike

By: Adam Begley

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 20 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

A 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 firsthand experience of the "adulterous society" he was credited with exposing in the best-selling 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.

©2014 Adam Begley (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

updike explained

as an Updike fan... it's hard to offer an unbiased opinion ....however I don't think any rational person would expect one from a fans review. i found it all so interesting. ...and much like his novels...i wanted it to go on and on...make it last...and it did. very detailed. ..very informative. ..very long. and...for that...i am most grateful. I would suggest anyone thinking of emersing yourself into the wonderful world of John Updike to use this as an owners manual of Updike....as for me....i immediately tried to read 2-3 updike novels at the same time...may long lost eagerness returned ...much like my innocence....and it was a welcomed , lost old friend. i cant imagine a greater joy then your first jobn updike novel.

Literary biography at its best

You don't have to be particularly interested in Updikes work to enjoy this. The writing is elegant, and thoughtful, without the usual plodding quality of many literary biographies.

Exemplary Literary Biography

Well read by Grover Gardner (I played it at 1.1 speed to avoid the sententious tone that sometimes creeps into Gardner’s reading). And don’t worry — Gardner avoids those mispronunciations of names that are the bane of so many Audible listeners.

Begley takes us through Updike’s fascinating but frustrating trajectory — with Updike elegiac and nostalgic about his own life even as a young man. By the time he was middle aged, it had become almost his shtick.

This biography came out in 2014 — I think if it were published now, Adam Begley would probably turn a more critical eye to — yes — the white supremacy built into Updike and his craft. For Updike, the 1950s were the golden time and the beautiful young Ipswich families, white and Christian and well-educated, the golden people. No other world seemed to come close.

Updike’s skills as a writer were almost incomparable. He really was a kind of Dutch Master who captured that world and those scenes at the breakfast table thrillingly and movingly “just as it was.”

But when he was forced to turn away from his domestic life as source material with his second marriage, his writing seemed to plunge in terms of using his skills to touch on greatness.

With astonishing sense of entitlement, Updike wrote books set in Africa and Brazil after a few weeks’ visit. And though he included an extremist Black character at the heart of Rabbit Redux, Updike’s personal life makes you wonder if he ever actually spoke with a Black person at any length or depth more than once or twice. His representation of characters of color doesn’t refute this impression.

This biography left me sad and thinking hard — and left me very appreciative of the clear, well-organized writing of his biographer and how well the narrator read it.

A beautiful, thoughtful tribute to a great American writer.

Wonderful. Begley does justice, as few if any could, to his subject. I would give this book five stars.