Library Journal03/15/2014
For this first biography of John Updike (1932–2009), Begley (editor, New York Observer) interviewed the author's friends and acquaintances, scoured library archives for correspondence, and assimilated much of the critical reception of the writer's fiction. He corroborates Updike's autobiographical admission that his destiny was shaped both by his strong-willed mother, who projected her literary aspirations onto her son, and by his birthplace, Shillington, PA, the archetype of the middle-class towns of his short stories and novels (The Centaur; Couples; the Rabbit tetralogy.) In a close reading of Updike's work, Begley fracts the dense shale of his subject's novels, short stories, and poems, extracting autobiographical substance, and melds it into an absorbing narrative.
