BECOMING JOHN UPDIKE: CRITICAL RECEPTION, 1958–2010

Abstract

BECOMING JOHN UPDIKE: CRITICAL RECEPTION, 1958-2010. By Laurence W. Mazzeno. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. $85.In an interview, "At Home with John Updike," that aired on WGBH TV on July 28, 1978, John Updike (1932-2009) suggested an analogy between the process of writing and the formation of coral reefs and snowfall. Accumulation is slow for each, but with a steady output over considerable time, the resulting yield can be truly substantial. This is apparent when considering Updike's oeuvre as well as its critical reception. For more than a half century, it has been snowing Updike, to the point that we now have an immense accumulation: Updike published more than sixty books; reviewers and critics have responded with forty full-length volumes, hundreds of articles, and thousands of book reviews (In the Beauty of the Lilies [1996] alone received two hundred reviews). Getting one's arms around Updike, then, is no small task, which is why Updike scholarship owes a debt to Laurence W. Mazzeno. Although not an Updike scholar, Mazzeno, the author of several works on Victorian literature and president emeritus of Alvernia University, located in the city of Updike's birth (Reading, Pennsylvania), has sifted through that writing to produce a clear, well-organized, and useful reference work.Becoming John Updike comprises ten chronological chapters, each of which covers about five years of criticism. The fifth chapter, spanning 1986 to 1990, devotes fifteen pages to summarizing book reviews of Roger's Version (1986), Trust Me (1987), S. (1988), Self-Consciousness (1989), Just Looking (1989), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) (one to four pages for each), then concludes with a nine-page summary of academic criticism published during that same period. The volume, Mazzeno explains, is designed "to trace the growth of Updike's reputation and examine the reasons for his success" (3).The word Becoming in the title is instructive and sheds light on why the volume does not, as it easily could, become tedious; reading sixty consecutive summaries of book reviews could, potentially, be lethal. Mazzeno keeps his narrative interesting by charting, through a half century of critical writings, "how [Updike] 'became' the 'John Updike' that, at his death, was almost universally hailed as a major voice in American literature" (3). Although similarities exist between Updike's early and later work (attention to the quotidian, a lushly eloquent style, etc.), Mazzeno makes it clear that Updike's fiction, essays, and poetry evolved. We may think that works such as Couples (1968), The Coup (1978), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Hugging the Shore (1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and Rabbit at Rest were inevitable, yet any reader of Updike's early work could hardly have predicted these volumes. Clearly, Updike's subject matter and thematic interests, like his prose style, developed and matured. While isolating a single factor behind these changes is challenging, Mazzeno suggests that "Updike engaged in dialogue with reviewers and academic critics" (2-3) to the degree that their writing played a role, perhaps, in his decision to step out of familiar territory, a decision that may have led him to write about Africa in The Coup and to inhabit a female perspective in The Witches of Eastwick.Mazzeno makes two important points early on that guide his study. The first point is that "Updike had the distinction of being reviewed early and often" (6). Unlike such contemporaries as Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, Updike was closely watched from his early twenties until his death at seventy-six. The second point is that, throughout his career, "Updike was a controversial figure in American letters: for some a major voice in fiction, for others a pretentious mannerist who substituted florid stylistic flourishes for substantive insight" (1). Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), highlights both points. Unusual, at least for a first novel, in its subject matter (a home for the elderly), it appeared briefly on the New York Times best-seller list and was reviewed widely. …