A vast amount of minutiae about the writer’s life is in there and I devoured it all. And a fan-you may have gathered I am one – cannot complain about the microscopic quality of Updike. A better word would be “microscopic”: using the microscope of his extraordinary prose, Updike reveals and articulates the largest mysteries of life. The problem for gravitas-chasing critics such as Bloom and Wood was that Updike writes small – and they mistook this for the size of his talent. He is the great poet of the ordinary life, of domesticity, of life as most people live it-as opposed to Saul Bellow, who writes mainly about life as deep-thinking intellectuals, academics and writers live it (and who was considered, mistakenly, a better writer throughout that time when the “Great Male Narcissists,” in David Foster Wallace’s phrase, ruled the literary cosmos).

Updike’s central creative project-like that of Jane Austen, George Eliot or Joyce but, I would contend, more extremely, perhaps more artfully, even than any of those-is, in his own phrase, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. no more useful than playing pin-the-tail with the genius label.” This anxiety, though, reflects a fairly consistent category error in American critical circles. The issue of Updike’s greatness hangs over this new biography by Adam Begley, who tries in his introduction to dismiss any anxiety that the subject of this long, insightful and meticulously researched book may be a second-rank talent by asserting: “Predicting his eventual place in the pantheon of American literature is.

S by john updike